Another Partition?

“I have a feeling that we are going to be a generation which is going to fail this country,” I remember my father saying to some friends of his in Kota, Rajasthan, where he was posted between 1970 and 1973 and where we went to school when we were really young. ‘We have fallen into a trap because of Partition,” he continued, “because the Partition is more or less a device for us now to keep fighting with each other.”

This was during the ’71 war where one of my uncles was at the borders fighting in the Army, and another was at sea on INS Vikrant. While one of my aunts was with us during the time because she couldn’t bear to be in Bombay just in case there was bad news, the other I remember was in Srinagar and we would book normal, urgent and lightening, all possible calls to her, never to know which one would go through first almost every night and wait, sometimes till well past midnight, so my father could speak to her and be assured that all was well. Meanwhile on his radio, we would switch between AIR and BBC 24/7.

Since both my parents had left their roots in Pakistan when Partition took place, discussions between them were extreme and my father being more volatile of the two abhorred the haphazard way India was inching towards modernisation. While my mother insisted that we should move to Bombay  from the small towns that we had lived in, my father would sulk and grumble that she was falling prey to the  devices of  capitalism  which were pushing people towards concrete jungles from their land, rich with resources, for the very wealthy to own and exploit.

My father has been gone for over two decades now, and yet everytime I remember things he would say to others, I realise that it is almost as if he knew what was coming, and where we were going. He had also predicted the break up of India into separate states, and said that it is inevitable that the separation of Pakistan from India is not the last Partition we have seen.

He had said that the poor will grow in numbers, and the rich will get richer. He had said we would be fighting the poor one day and each bit of violence is going to lead to the birth of new power centers and a day will come when every power center will want to follow its own ideology, its own vision. He had said that in an unequally divided society, neither capitalism, nor socialism have the capacity to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor, because both ideologies breed a culture of unequal distribution of opportunity as well as wealth, while they proclaim something else and ironically echo each other’s agendas.

He would often tell us not to be fooled by the capitalists as their intent to be dictatorial is hidden behind the veil of a perception of freedom that we are all so prone to fall for. They are no different from the communists who have similar aspirational designs and hunger for power. ‘Because’, he would say, “when in power, all ideologies lose their core vision and fall prey to the men at the top, who in that predicament are all the same”.

I understood later that it is not necessary for similar words to mean the same thing, nor for that which is spoken differently to ‘not’ mean the same thing. Today, in 2011, the Left, the Right, socialism and capitalism are the various ideologies amongst other extremes, which apply to different parts in India, because of various political divisions over time. Bringing everyone together across one table to talk and discuss issues, is the greatest challenge for any political party. Any party in power has to take along and appease every section while hauling the nation forward and it is probably impossible to create  synergy in times like this. Thus, the threat of terror, insurgency and violence looms large.

And in a desperate attempt to tackle all the varied opinions, political parties are now forging alliances with conflicting points of view. This is not coalition politics anymore but confused politics.The whole concept of who we are, and what we stand for, is lost somewhere.

Our government is more or less like a gang of school children whose moves are being orchestrated by some unknown external force. We hardly seem to have any say in internal as well as external matters. We seem to be a government held at ransom and a country living at the edge perpetually. I’ll be called a conspiracy theorist by all, but I can’t help but analyse why we are so silent about the mafia wars going on within our nation where the rich and the powerful must crush the poorest of the poor of their own nation.

Huge conglomerates chasing land to invest unbelievable wealth in and acquire the right to more natural resources are in a position to address the issues of the poor. Then why aren’t they doing it? What are they afraid of? What is this trap which our politicians, political parties and corporates have gone and got caught in?

Is politics and power all that matters?  We have to admit, that all the double standards, the triple speak and hypocrisies of our political parties have been  revealed and the politicians have been exposed. They have brought India to a place where today, it is the intellectuals who are slanting towards extremists like the Maoists and Naxals in order to support them against State atrocities and the greed of the powerful.

Why is the State not coming clean on its agenda with the tribals? Why cannot  politicians demand that corporates who want inhabited land, present to the nation the blueprint they have for the poor who they will displace in the name of growth? Why do political parties who are  poles apart, stand together when it comes to  the Maoist and the Naxal issue?

The question I ask is, can we afford more bloodshed of innocents to defend our resistance to inclusion? Can’t we, as a State focus on the problems of the poorest without filtering them through vote bank politics? Will we see more Partitions before we come to our senses ?  I hope not.

Vinta Nanda is a film maker, writer and social activist.  She has   written, directed and/or produced trail blazing TV shows like Tara, Raahat, Kabhie Kabhie, Aur Phir Ek Din and Miilee and also   made several documentary films on women’s issues. Her first feature film, White Noise won acclaim at the Kara Film Festival, Pune International Film Festival, Florence and Seattle Indian Film Festivals. Vinta blogs on www.vinatananda.blogspot.com and has written for The Times of India, Tehelka, Indian Express, Mumbai Mirror, Sahara Times and Mid Day. Vinta is also the President of the NGO ‘The Village Project India,’ is producing two TV shows and will be producing and directing her next feature Zindagi Paradiso shortly.