India after Gandhi

For the past 2 months have been reading this 750 page book by Ramachandra Guha. Extremely well researched, giving a comprehensive history on India from 1948 to 2006, this book is a must read for people fascinated by the idea and uniqueness of India.

The book carries deep insights into most of the events in post independent India. At the end of the book the author dwells into "Why India Survives?". This is one of the questions that baffle me. The last few lines of the book is as follows,

so long as the constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails, so long as the citizens can speak and write in the language of their choice, so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army and so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung, India will survive.

I feel most people of my generation (born post 1980) have a myopic view of leaders like Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Everyone had their own failings but we need to understand them in the context of the time in which they lived. This book lets one take a look at the leaders of India in wholesome and understand their successes and failures.

Narendra Modi 2007

Narendra Modi is back in national news, with the Gujarat elections nearing. Last week he walked off midway from an interview with Karan Thapar. The Nov 3, 2007 issue of Tehelka claims to be the most important story of our times. It has interviews with the rioters, rapists, bomb makers et al. It goes into the gruesome details of how they went about it in Gujarat for 4 days from Feb 26, 2002.

Gujarat riots 2002, baffles us because it defies our assumptions that education and economic development (Gujarat being one of the most developed states of India) will lessen the differences and occurrences of conflict in a society. It has proved that we will let ourselves to be divided and ruled, no matter the progress we make as a society. Most Gujaratis I have met (Incidentally, all of them have been Hindus) have an idolatry view of Mr.Modi. Some of them have even said that as long as they were not affected, they didn't care about what happened to the communal harmony in their state. Modi might have made Gujarat the state attracting the highest FDI in India, but it is long since he ceased to be a human being.

This post has nothing to do with the fact that Modi represents the BJP which I equally dislike. For the record, Congress has been equally bad. Who can forget the 1984 Delhi Sikh riots, when Rajiv Gandhi remarked that "when a tree falls, the earth is bound to shake". Despite the Congress being in power at the centre since 2004, nothing has moved forward with regard to the 2002 riot cases.

I seriously hope there is something called hell and Modi stays there long enough.