ELECTIONS '98
COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

From crisis to catharsis

The grand ladies presiding over New Delhi's salon are going through a traumatic experience. They are, most of them, of impeccable Miranda House-Welham School vintage. Some of the relatively more elderly amongst them even have memories of an Isabella Thouburn upbringing, the very last word in sophistication and refinement. The current goings-on in Parliament have been harbingers of excruciating pain. The free flow of incentives during the day's proceedings, non-stop shouts and counter-shouts, frequent rushing to the well of the house, adjournments on the flimsiest of grounds, little work to show by either house at the end of the week; each such detail morally offends the ladies.

The embarrassment these cause before visiting foreign guests is not negligible either. This should not have happened; as the ladies perceive it, it is as if parliamentary democracy as practised in the country has got sidetracked in the grisly affairs of that horrid state, Bihar. The government, the instinct of the ladies tells them, must do something about it before things go completely out of hand, manners and decorum must return, members of parliament must learn to behave and stop wasting taxpayers' money.

Should not these grand ladies be told openly, bluntly, that they are mistaken? Parliament is not on wrong rails, it is simply that, for the first time since Independence, the nitty-gritty issues that constitute the staple of India are forcing themselves on Parliament. An historical misdoing is in the process of being corrected, the reality of Bihar with all its shame and sadness, is suddenly being laid bare with in the precincts of the Parliament of India. That reality is rude and crude. Bihar, why cannot we admit, is as good as ungovernable. It is in a state of civil war, even though there was no formal announcement at the time the hostilities began. And none known how these will end, or when.

Castes and classes are tearing one another apart. The forces of law and order have gone into disuse. Private armies have come to the fore instead. These armies call themselves by different nomenclatures. It does not matter though; each of them has the same objective in view: to exterminate the class or caste enemies. Class has in fact been rendered indistinguishable from caste, and vice versa. The environment is ugly, as ugly as it can be. If one is inclined to put it that way, it is recession into a dark chapter of history, such as the Middle Ages.

There are others who would vehemently differ from formulations of such as extreme nature. On the contrary, the ongoing occurrences, in their view, epitomise progress of the purest kind: a cycle of catharsis is at work, a catharsis the sweep and magnitude of which would have drawn appreciative comments from the Greek philosophers and dramatists of yore.

Whether one would rejoice at the outcome of the catharsis is an altogether different matter. If one's caste or class comes up on top at the end of the gory war, one would be deliriously happy; if it goes down to defeat, one would drown oneself in sorrow. But then, such tragedies are the stuff of history. History is being enacted in Bihar, Bihar is a battleground. Passion accumulated over decades -- or is it over centuries? -- has been unleashed. The passion is being backed by not just firearms, but strategies coherent and not so coherent, promising far-flung consequences.

New Delhi will be living in a fool's paradise if it thinks it can either remain unaffected by the war in Bihar, or majestically intervene in it, as in the olden days, by exercising its inherited prerogative of overlordship. The past presumptions on the part of the rulers ensconced in the nation's capital are now catching up with them. The long phase of malign indifference has provoked the laws of history. The upshot is the physical transmittal of the grisly Bihar war into the house of Parliament. Nemesis has taken charge; Parliament has been forced to cope with Bihar, a Bihar replete with vulgarity and uncouthness. Civilities can be forgotten in such a climate of primal emotion. Parliament is in danger of being sucked into a whirlpool of grime and dirt.

It is without question crisis of a first order. There is no obvious way out of it. Bihar, after all, is an integral part of India. It can claim the same rights and prerogatives as the rest of the country does. If the state of their being is at stake, the people of Bihar have every justification to take a walk to the nation's capital and seek redress.

Till a while ago, New Delhi could have ridden roughshod over the ramblings of disquiet originating from Bihar and the situation would nonetheless be described as normal. Such sorrowful annals go way back. The struggle for freedom came and went. Because M K Gandhi drew them in, the inarticulate masses of Bihar participated heart and soul in the Independence movement. Perhaps they cherished some inchoate hopes of social and economic liberation to emerge from the specific phenomenon of Independence.

Five decades have gone by. The masses of Bihar, those who constitute its hinterland, have been shortchanged by the system. Nothing has been done to alter the state of landlessness of the majority, nor to lessen the unbearable load of burden on the bataidars. It is no accident, but again an offshoot of the remorseless historical process, that most of this repressed majority should also happen to belong to the so called inferior castes and tribes. These sections have been denied the use of not just land, but also of the opportunity of education, health and nutrition. The rulers in New Delhi have been optimists of extraordinary proportions; the old order, they have consistently assumed, could continue for ever and ever and land could remain undistributed, education to those who needed it most could remain unimparted and health and nutrition retained as monopoly possessions of the top layers in society.

The calculations have gone wrong in one respect. Irrespective of the determination of the ruling classes to hold on to what they have and irrespective of the illiteracy to which the majority of the Bihar population have been condemned, social awareness has filtered through, drip by drip. This penetration of knowledge on the details of the artifacts of exploitation and greed on the part of the society's rich has taken place at a much sharper pace in recent years than earlier on account of the rapid strides made by the modes and modalities of information.

This is once more an instance of the irony of history unfolding itself. The exploitation of information technology is the archetypal symbol of privilege put on display by the upper classes. But this new technology has its quirks; its ownership can be monopolised but the information cannot be, it filters through layers and layers of obfuscation. Men and women in inferiorly placed social positions get to know that the indignities they are victims of are reversible, provided they learn to mobilise and clamour for what legitimately belongs to them.

Once the hitherto underprivileged begin to come to their own, all of a sudden the milieu is transformed, the social coordinates are totally reconstructed and Bihar becomes a grim battlefield. And because so little has been done all this time for this Indo-Gangetic state, the battlefield threatens to shift to the two houses of Parliament, flouting the rules of civilisation.

The grand ladies, pedigree Isabella Thoburn-Welham-Miranda House, will therefore continue to suffer henceforth a series of uncomfortable experiences. Similarly situated ladies in European countries had near identical experiences, in diverse forms, in the 17th and 18th centuries. The phenomenon of Ranbir Senas and Lal Senas is hard datum. Give or take a few extra hours, on the principle that the more it is the merrier it is, a further array of regiments, platoons and brigades is likely to choke the arena. The vulgarity and coarseness of these hordes notwithstanding, they are destined to march through the two houses of Parliament in full battlegear.

Bihar, of course, has one advantage: the Constitution permits it to send as many as 54 members to the Lok Sabha. The northeastern states, in contrast, have too few members to enable them to create mayhem of the same magnitude in Parliament. That is a tragedy for those states, but the greater tragedy is for the Republic of India.

Ashok Mitra