Category: Bloody Opinions

If there is something that gets the average Indian’s blood boiling, it is the idea of war. There is something uniquely attractive about war – it serves to satiate our sense of nationalism, our sense of the need for quick remedies and of course, the need for violence. Humans are by nature attracted to violence, which both explains the breathtaking amount of mental space we expend on trying not to be violent, and also the number of fuck-ups we end up with for not heeding this ocean of advice we created ourselves. But not all wars are equal, or equally winnable.

Take China for instance. It was our good fortune to have a retired brigadier speak of India’s foreign relations during a recently concluded course. I asked him why we can’t deal with our bête noire, China, since China seems to have the only combination of anti-India interests and capacity to cause real problems. He answered that China couldn’t be called our annoyer-in-chief, and avoided the remainder of the question. Now he is right about the first part (and the only part he answered), since the average Indian does not consider China to be the principal problem. Ask the man on the street, and you would at most get some vague response such as “stop using Chinese goods”. What else ? Nothing.

So even if China manages to block India’s attempts across the diplomatic board and strip away allies from South Asia to Africa, Indians as a whole aren’t very concerned. This too without China launching a charm offensive, proof of which can be seen in that while we use Chinese products, we are still extremely racist and xenophobic as far as real Chinese are concerned.

But the retired soldier did not simply avoid my question, he diverted it to his favourite talking point – the case of Pakistan. We were being given the standard explanation of why Pakistan is a problem. An overtly-tolerant Nehru, a hoodwinked Indira Gandhi, Pakistan’s own weak political establishment, the domination of the Punjabi-army and the need to maintain the raison d’etre of Pakistan in religious jihad. Net result was a number of wars, which had been completely dominated by India, and which led Pakistan to choose its cunning “thousand cuts strategy” to wear out Indian forces. So we needed to deal with Pakistan more than China. Period.

I won’t go into the solutions proposed, since they too are way too textbookish. What mattered is that he was clear on one thing – war won’t solve the issue by itself. We had fought plenty of wars with Pakistan, and these wars had yielded next to nothing due to the lack of political will. More wars without proper diplomatic follow-up will yield nothing more than losses. Since the Indian army was completely subservient to the civilian establishment, more bloodshed without political machismo would simply bring us back to square one.

Up to this point, I didn’t have much disagreement with him. It is true that at summits following major wars, the way we returned land and soldiers to the Pakistanis is unconscionable. It is also true that more wars would probably yield even less results because the situation in South Asia continues to leave less and less room for rapid and decisive action. War for the sake of war is something we left behind in the trenches of WWI, and it’s best not to bring those antiquated ideas back.

But he had one last thing to say. He believed our current dispensation – led by Narendra Modi – was made of a different material. It was at last showing the necessary gumption to walk the talk as far as political will was concerned. Be it a surgical strike or the recent Balakot attack in response to Pulwama, the PM was finally showing strength of an order no one previously had. Our enemies would now learn to fear us, and this itself would act as a deterrent.

I couldn’t disagree more. Personal political views aside, Modi’s relations with Pakistan have been vacillating at best, shifting from hugs to surgical strikes like the weather changes from sunshine to rain in a matter of moments. But it’s not my intention to look at the whole history of Indo-Pak relations in the NDA-II years. Instead, I’ll simply focus on the most recent events, beginning with the attack on the CRPF convoy in Pulwama.

This attack was nothing new. For years, nay decades, the Indian forces had been under attack, with notable incidents like Pathankot and Uri coming to mind even before we begin speaking of Pulwama. There can be endless debate on whether we have learnt our lessons or not, but the bigger point for me is how we respond to these attacks.

Right off the bat, it must be said that the response to Uri was somewhat novel. Even if we discount the romanticized exaggeration of Bollywood, it can be said without doubt that the surgical strikes which followed clearly managed to do significant damage to the terror infrastructure within PoK. It was not so much the action itself, but its scale and efficacy that remain as indelible marks of success for both the military establishment and their political masters.

Fast forward to Pulwama, and our first target wasn’t so much the Pakistanis, as the Kashmiris. All over India, Kashmiri traders, students and journalists came under attack from their fellow Indians. This was nationalism masquerading as xenophobia, finding enemies within to compensate for attacks from separatists. To make matters worse, people seen defending innocent Kashmiris were hauled up and beaten as well, marking a clear Balkanisation of the Indian psyche which had not existed as recently as 2016.

The government, for its part, bided its time, arguing that the army had been given complete freedom to choose where and how to attack. One wonders whether this wasn’t the politicians simply insuring themselves against the backlash should anything go wrong. After all, if the army messed up, then the army was to blame. And you couldn’t blame the army without being anti-national. So no one would be blamed.

Eventually, we did get the tit-for-tat response. Our jets flew into Gilgit-Baltistan (beyond PoK) and bombed a place called Balakot. It was declared that we had attacked and destroyed one of the main staging areas for terror attacks in J&K. Blank spaces remained, but we assumed these would be filled up in due course. In the meantime, everyone who had been rooting for a punitive war against Pakistan celebrated their and their uncle/aunt’s victory over Pakistan. The media outlets waxed eloquent (if screaming at a high volume be eloquence) about the success of India in dealing with Pakistan and how the latter had been taught a lesson. As if we hadn’t already been completing the syllabus every time the truants attacked us in the past.

All this was expected, but what happened thereafter was not. For one thing, confusion deepened. Information did not come out, and questions raised received questions in return. How many terrorists were killed ? Did we stop to count the number ? Okay, then what about Pakistan saying we bombed a forest ? Did Pakistan pay you to say this ? The questions and the jingoistic counter-questions dominated the media relentlessly, providing TRPs and noise which drowned out the actual achievement of the air force. Questions remained and remained unanswered in the minds of people who took a moment to think about it.

Before this storm would settle, Pakistan counterattacked. Except we didn’t learn that it had counterattacked until much later. All we learnt was that there was a dogfight in the skies and two of their planes had been shot down. Alright, good for the IAF. But then we learnt that only one plane had been shot down. Another plane that had been shot down was our own, and it had landed in Pakistani territory. Great, so it wasn’t that clean a victory after all. But when did this all happen ? Did we attack again ? Did they attack us ? Counterattack ? Oh, okay. But they were pushed back right. Some nationalist pride was salvaged.

But then we learnt that Wing Commander Abhinandan had been captured by the Pakistanis. Would we go to war against them ? Musn’t we ? The odd thing here was that the TV channels, which had been celebrating the success of Modi’s warlike strategy, cooled down to argue for a measured approach. Not caution, because caution doesn’t garner TRP, but maybe leave it to the actual leaders to take the call instead of braying for war ? The goal was now to get the man with the big moustache back.

Before anyone could decide how to get him back, Imran Khan (Pakistani PM) simply said he would be returned. No questions asked, he would be returned as a gesture of humanity. Our political leaders quickly tried to spin this as Pakistan being forced to return the Indian officer. But there appeared little sign of compulsion. Pakistan – after all – had returned Abhinandan on its own, before (and therefore without) any major diplomatic or military sparring. The “bound to” argument had to be stretched to its limits in the case of the POW.

In the meantime, focus had been shifted to how Abhinandan had been a great officer, who had shot down a F-16 with a MiG-21. Technicalities aside, this was indeed something admirable, since the MiG-21 was far older. But whose job was it to ensure that Abhinandan had a better plane than the flying coffin ? In our euphoria at getting the POW back, this question was conveniently forgotten. We were back to celebrating the army – and by unjustified extension, Modi’s – success against Pakistan.

But such celebration was muted, not because the leaders didn’t spend enough on news channels or firecrackers (or garlands) but because to many Indians, and the world at large, the spectacle of the latest Indo-Pakistan sparring had left an impression different from the ones earlier. For the first time, India seemed to be more eager than Pakistan to prove the latter was evil. For the first time, the dearth of data and confusing narratives was coming from the Indian side rather than the facetious Pakistanis. Finally, for the first time, it was the Pakitanis who were making a humane gesture instead of India. We may or may not have won the dogfight, but we lost control of, and eventually lost, the narrative through our overexertion to prove our vision of a strong government and a strong nation correct.

If we suffered a defeat in the domain of public perception, we also suffered in our other actions with Pakistan. We removed Pakistan’s Most Favoured Nation (a trade term) status and warned that we would stop water from our rivers to theirs. But going beyond this, we stopped their shooters from participating in international games being held in India. This earned us a stern warning from the international bodies, the message being that India’s applications to host future international events would be in jeopardy. Given that our sportspersons and sports administrators are no less nationalistic than our soldiers or Modi himself (more so in all likelihood), it seems patently unfair to make them suffer so we can show our vindictive side.

But it was not just sports that suffered. The biggest sufferers were those who spoke out against this patent mess that occurred. Questions were raised from day one, regarding matters as technical as diverging satellite imagery of Balakot, to the very simple question of why the details were not released completely in an organized manner. These questions were not only brushed aside for being anti-national, but their owners were also punished. Case in point is a professor in Orissa who was dismissed for raising critical questions. In my own city of Kolkata, no less than three people were actually beaten up for casting doubt on the course of events and the veracity of the many claims made by both sides.

Obviously, none of this affects Pakistan in any way. If the monolithic image of Pakistan be the one we truly subscribe to, it should be assumed that the civil society in Pakistan has no voice, and regardless of what they say or we say, the army would not be moved. They being deceitful, would use everything we say against us without any moral compunctions. So does it really matter what we say ?

It does, for us. We are a democracy and a country with a vibrant public sphere that even the emergency could not suppress. From nationalistic journalism to sting posts, our press does anything and everything, and we must be proud of that. Our intellectuals – teachers, professors, lawyers, activists and students all included – are respected the world over, and this respect comes not because we like or dislike Pakistan, but because of what we say for ourselves and about the world at large. To question these pillars of free speech would be to take our country backward toward colonial times, since democracy and free speech go hand in hand.

In fact, the willingness of a section of the populace – both the paid trolls and goons and the silent spectators – to condone hooliganism and enforced silence in the name of nationalism, is a sign of fascism. As is xenophobia. Plurality of language, opinion and religion cut across all “dominant” narratives, and domination can only be secured through violence in the last resort. Once secured however, it creates and perpetuates a sense of self-censorship and further silence that allows this narrative to become hegemonic i.e. to enter the minds of people and control them from within. Support for, and compliance with, the proponents of the narrative becomes a compulsion against which we gradually stop thinking because thinking leads to speaking and speaking is pointless if we only get beaten up and lose our jobs.

In a sense, then, the call for unity against anything – terrorism, Pakistan or fascism – must not be at the cost of suppressing cross-currents of thought and opinion. Our country does not need the weakness of Pakistan, nor would our opinions weaken India and make Pakistan strong. Instead, we stand to lose our democracy and freedom by relentlessly searching for the “enemies within”. It’s time we held the vigilantes for the war against “enemies within” to account, or prepared to be crushed within our own minds.

The Stuart kings – and James II in particular – were known for their confidence in their own God-given right to rule. They neither liked the parliamentary rubber-stamping that Elizabeth I sought, nor thought it necessary until there was an invading army to fight and no money in the treasury. But why James II in particular ? Partly because the king came to power not through an arduous process of Darwinian trial, but rather smoothly. This, one can argue, increased his sense of complacency and made him feel that pushing the Puritans and parliamentary groups to his position would be easy. The result, as we all know, was a nosebleed and a loss of power to a guy from Netherlands.

You’d think this particular episode would have a straight parallel with the current Brexit scenario. Britain overestimated her ability to push away the European Union to the positions she preferred (positions being a marker of acute schizophrenia in this case) and learnt that in the end, the Europeans held the cards. Now she’s facing up to the possibility that not only would she have to shell out a ungodly amount of cash, but also accept many of the environmental, trade and tariff regulations that govern the European Union.

But this would be too simple. The British aren’t simpletons to think that they can walk off from a marriage in a huff, tearing everything up and making her own rules as she goes along. Nor could they simply believe that the EU would bow to every argument they made. National pride aside, the EU collective, as a whole, far outstripped Britain in terms of economy, populace and geopolitical clout. And the EU had every reason to prove that moving out of the Union was a messy, chaotic, costly and divisive path that was fundamentally not in the interest of any member nation to take. Else every country dissatisfied with the EU – from Italy with her budgets to Greece with her debt – would simply follow the example of Britannia and slam the door on Michel Barnier, Jean-Claude Juncker and Co.

Yet if you read the news, far too many people seem to be blaming exactly this sense of entitlement, arrogance and confidence for the miserable state the island collective finds herself in. It’s said that the Brexiters specifically believed that the EU would bow to their every wish, that the countries within and outside would line up to sign trade deals and the EU could “whistle” all it wanted about a big divorce bill. In the end, the trade secretaries would be buccaneering around the world signing trade deals, the UK could cherry-pick which immigrants to let in and restore “sovereignty” over every aspect of her national life. The last is especially important, because it was implied that she could erase all those ornery EU regulations and pencil in her own regulations. Parliament and country would finally be sovereign (long live the Queen!)

So let’s look at this argument in a little more detail. The argument begins by saying that Britain had an empire, which was the best in the world. But she was no despot. Instead, constitutional monarchy at home and gradual devolution of power in the colonies ensured that while the metropole remained stable, the colonies thrived, gaining freedom in proportion to their ability to rule themselves. When the time came, they took their rightful place under the sun and became equal members of the Commonwealth, resplendent in British values such as freedom, equal rights and democracy (sometimes).

But there’s more. The country stood alone for a good while during both world wars, fighting off the imperialist and then fascist designs of Germany. More than any other country (US and Russia included) it was Britain that sacrificed to secure the future of humanity. An ideal British future of course.

And all this leaves out so much. Take the industrial revolution. Take the development of modern capitalism in the City. Take cricket. Take that one time they won the World Cup in football. Take…..

Alright, that’s enough. Honestly, the above account is a bit exaggerated, and it would perhaps be hard to find anyone born in the 1980s and after who believes all this. But they believe a good part of it. Human beings since the age of the Homo habilis have been passing on their “culture” to their kids. And it would not be an exaggeration to argue that the most crucial part of this culture – the sense of self in social context – was passed on by the older generation. A generation that believed in these ideas more fully, having been born during the World War and at least, when the empire was still a reality. These people would have passed on stories of themselves and their forefathers in the theatres of war, and in the colonies. Throw in some Kipling, some Lawrence of Arabia, and some grandmothers’ tales, and you have the perfect recipe for an imperial “culture”.

Now remember, such an imperial culture was one of privilege. Regardless of their financial well being (and they were often better off than at least their counterparts of colour), the British enjoyed a position of relative social well-being and power. This was used and buttressed by racial exclusivism and paternalism towards the coloured “races”. The stories narrated would be contextualized by such racially motivated ideals of superiority and the actual facts of privilege enjoyed by the forefathers. So much so that the very ideal of British manliness would be linked up with these ideals.

Hence, a Jacob Rees-Mogg, or a David Davis, or any of the other Conservative Brexiters demanding a return of British sovereignty, would either belong to the immediate post-war generation (Baby Boomers) or a later one but fully infused with this imperial culture. It would be natural then, for them to chafe at the supposed straitjacket that was the backward EU.

But there’s one more problem. The EU isn’t made up of a bunch of former British colonies, nor could they be considered coloured. Instead, they include all of the other major former imperial powers (Japan excepted). France, Spain and Portugal all had huge empires, which rivalled the British and provoked more than one war. Indeed, in terms of power, extent and population, one or the other exceeded the zenith of the British Empire at one point or the other. Taken together, they of course did so by miles.

Quite naturally, each of these former colonial powers would have rosy ideals of their own colonial past. The French would have stories of the Maghrib, the Spanish of the Spanish Sahara, and the Portuguese of their possessions in Central and West Africa. And that is just Africa. There would be tales of Southeast Asia, South Asia, South America and so on.

So why are these countries sticking to the EU ? Surely there are a substantial number of people who wish to reassert their sovereignty based on a glorious imperial vision of the past ? To be fair, this question itself is partly Anglocentric. With Brexit hogging the headlines, the Europeans are automatically placed in positions of observers and commenters, not actors. The British do – or fail to do – and the EU reacts.

Cut through this bias in the English language press and one could find that there are people in the EU mainland states that are also rather dissatisfied with the Eurozone and the Union. Yet they don’t trigger referendums and then go through messy divorce deals with their heads in the clouds. In fact, they remain even more closely bonded together since they share many of the financial systems associated with the Euro, which Britain never became part of.

This brings us to the question – if a sense of colonial nostalgia and a colonial worldview are to blame for the Brexit mess, how come Britain is solely – or at least, worst – affected ? I would argue that the answer lies in how decolonization took place in Britain compared to the other European states. And for purposes of convenience, I will look specifically at France and Portugal. Spain, for all her pompous grandeur, followed a different trajectory in the 20th Century.

To begin with, let’s question the idea that Britain provided civilization to the colonies. Each of the colonial powers offered – and force-fed – their versions of culture to the people they conquered. It takes time to ingrain this culture into the minds of the colonized. Sure, there are economic incentives and political opportunities to be had in imbibing this culture. However, internalization is a complex process which – as Partha Chatterjee has shown – takes place in the minds of the colonized, not simply in assembly halls and purses. With such mental colonization develops mental resistance, which eventually takes the shape of nationalist anti-colonialism.

Yet neither in terms of depth nor time was British cultural influence unique. What Partha Chatterjee shows of India, Frantz Fanon has shown for North Africa. Sure, the time period and the processes are different. But one cannot call the British one deep and the others skin-deep. In terms of time period too, Britain can’t hold the torch. Portuguese colonialism occurred during a period when Britain was still forming her institutions. In the regions that Portugal held onto, she introduced everything from the Inquisition to Portuguese cuisine. If we accept that colonialism develops with time, then the Portuguese can claim pole position in the race to carry the white man’s burden.

Yet perhaps the crux of British exceptionalism lies not so much in introducing the British culture itself, but in introducing British institutions. Regardless of the cultural and political level of the colonized, the British argued that they needed to be introduced to British institutions. In the prevailing spirit of liberalism, even the most ardently conservative politician would drape colonialism in the garb of preparing the people for eventual self-government. This was more true of India, than say Africa, since Indian culture was seen as more advanced than the African ones.

The British would argue that true to their goal, they gradually introduced self-government. This was done first in the regions that were socially and culturally (and racially) at the same level as the British – Canada, Australia, etc. and then gradually to the lower levels. That culturally superior India became independent earlier than say the African colonies, fits in nicely with this narrative.

The problem here is that this is partially true. Compared to the French or the Portuguese, the British did manage to introduce greater measures of self-government at earlier periods in the histories of their colonial rule. The reasons for this have less to do with British culture than with the complex interplay of factors in French/Portugese culture and their differently developing institutions. Yet when dates and figures are shown, the fact remains that the British were more willing to devolve power than were the French or the Portugese.

This can easily gel with ideals of British justice and fairness. Colonized intellectuals were often told of a legendary institution called British justice, which would ensure that each got his/her due. When that due came to involve questions of surrender of power, the British were only too happy to do so. This, again, can easily be made to work with facts. British decolonization proceeded with a false sense of smoothness. False, in the sense that the colonized had to struggle relentlessly to gain the freedom they deserved. But there were no violent breaks such as prolonged civil wars.

Take the case of India. While the nationalist movement strove hard to achieve freedom, the imperialist can argue with some merit that the British gave an increasingly large amount of power. This meant that despite there being revolt and rebellions throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, imperialism was never in crisis since the 1857 revolt until the British chose to pull down the shutters.

Similarly, the African possessions of the Empire transitioned relatively smoothly. While insurgencies did exist, there were no major civil wars in say Egypt, or Sudan, or British East Africa. In Asia, the British colonies either remained in the hands of the British without facing any existential crisis (Hong Kong, Singapore), or moved towards freedom through institutional, and comparatively peaceful means (Burma, Malaya).

While this could persuade the British that theirs was a benevolent imperialism that gave the best British ideals and institutions to the subject nations and then set them free like a schoolmaster bidding well to his graduating students, France and Portugal had rather different experiences. As mentioned, neither was particularly interested in devolving power to the extent the British did.

In the French case, the country tried to take its possessions in Indo-China back to the pre-war situations after World War II. Leaders like Ho Chi Minh would not accept this. This sparked a violent civil war that ended with French accepting their military inadequacy and leaving Indo-China to its fate.

But this was not the only trouble facing the newly formed Fourth Republic. While many regions of Africa decolonized without extensive bloodshed, Algeria dragged France into another war. Here, the resident French, called Pieds Noirs, fought to keep the country within France (it was considered a province and not a separate colony). This precipitated a crisis that eventually led the French to dissolve their assembly and place power in the hands of a military general who had come out of retirement. If the French could claim any ingenuity from this whole episode, it was that De Gaulle remained a republican head with a functional democracy, and didn’t turn Fifth Republic France into a military dictatorship (although, ahem, Napoleon II anyone ?).

Portugal, by contrast, lost her military dictatorship trying to hold onto her colonies. Even as the European colonial powers were becoming convinced that they would not be able to hold onto their Indian possessions for much longer, Portugal obstinately held onto Goa, Daman and Diu. Eventually, she had to face an Indian army invasion and occupation.

From this time onwards, she had to expend more and more money to militarily hold onto her colonies. This proved especially costly in Africa, where both the Soviet Union and the US were trying to win support of groups that each hoped would succeeded the effete colonial powers. Matters reached a head in 1974, when the crumbling colonial edifice sparked a military revolt, surprisingly supported by the civilian populace. The Carnation Revolution dismantled the remaining colonies of Portugal and also the Estado Novo, ushering in democracy in the Iberian country.

Long story short, while Britain could, with some legitimacy and gross oversimplification, claim that her endgame of empire was one of gradual and orderly withdrawal, the French and Portugese could make no such claim. Hence, if the British grandmothers told their grandkids that British honour and justice was unique and contributed to the fairness of the grand design of colonialism, they could back them up with some facts and figures. Their French and Portuguese counterparts would probably not be able to say the same of the Algerian Civil War or the Carnation Revolution.

This brings us back to the question of Brexit. The arrogance shown during Brexit arises from this belief in a colonial past. This belief in the colonial past, and by corollary, Britain’s unique qualities and unique right to claim special status under the sun, remained untarnished to a great extent. The ideals of colonialism remained ideals that appeared good and admirable. They remained ideals that could inspire, and in doing so, allow generations who had seen nothing except the dying embers of colonialism, to still believe in the greatness and the uniqueness of Britannia and her children. France and Portugal tried longer and harder to hold onto their colonies, and in doing so, suffered such irreparable damage that the ideals of colonialism could no longer gel with their ideals of national pride. If anything remained of the idea of national uniqueness, it had to be distanced to some degree from the debacles of the mid-20th Century.

Hence, while Britain continued to believe in her glorious colonial past and see the world through a lens that no one else used any longer, the French and Portuguese had to remake their world views. They gradually became convinced that given their diminished stature and power, they could only wield the stick if they stuck together. Hence they chose to remain in the EU. Britain, with her colonial ideals, never could feel herself to be at one with these lesser mortals. She chose to dream on and leave the petty realists, and in doing so, was dunked in the cold but clear water of  reality. But will she wake up ?

We live in a populous country, overpopulated being the most common adjective. Our people/km squared stands in the thousands even in rural areas with any semblance of life. In cities, the numbers simply reach astronomical figures, epitomized in day-to-day life by the “hustle-bustle” of the city. Wherever you go, people are pushing along, making their own microscopic spaces within a system that will not yield an inch without an elbow. Each step on the footpath, and each swerve of the car, is a carefully measured move designed to avoid those around you. Space comes at a huge premium, and huge spaces – emptiness – are unnatural.

Now to be honest, emptiness is unnatural. Nature abhors vacuum, and given the chance, she will fill up every bit of available space with something or someone. There’s no better example of this than the endless encroachments of plants and small animals in abandoned houses, and the fungal growth of slums in previously empty fields and under bridges/flyovers. Ergo, space and emptiness have to be created and held against the laws of nature in a country like ours. And when you create something artificially, it is never without purpose.

Such thoughts circled in my mind as I sat on a lazy Monday afternoon in the Professors’ Common Room of Presidency University. I had come to meet someone, to get something signed, and then go off to lunch and submit the thing I needed signed. All that had to happen before my coursework class, which was hardly an hour and half away. Time, then, wasn’t exactly my playmate. Arriving in the huge main room (you can call it a hall by the dimensional standards of the modern ceremony halls) I was greeted with near-emptiness. I duly dumped my bag at a respectable place and headed to the room of the person I sought. The light was on, but no one was in. Probably in class. I’d have to wait.

So I settled into one of the many wooden chairs with green upholstery that now stand guard around three tables arranged in the middle of the room. One presumes these are used to hold meetings of the professors, because the arrangement has a distinct formality to it, whether it is in the drab design of the chairs, the fact that the tables are arranged in a line or the glass top of the central and largest table. Yes, glass tops somehow speak of authority like nothing can.

But there was no meeting being held, and in my now frequent visits in the past few months, I’d never seen a meeting being held there. Which was good, because I personally didn’t like the idea of being shoved out of a heavily air-conditioned room into the blistering late monsoon heat outside. Perhaps I’ve become soft due to the hours spent in the air-conditioned staff room of the college where I teach. But I very much prefer large air-conditioned rooms for some reason.

The room had one or two students (other than me) when I had arrived, and they soon decided the air-conditioning wasn’t doing them any good. Or they, in their student senses had alerted them against spending too much time in the preserve of the professors. That sense had dulled in me, and so I relaxed myself which going through the letter I needed signed, for the umpteenth time. It was a boring letter, written in a grumpy voice for a grumpy official. My mind wandered, but within the walls of the room.

The room itself was not new. Nay, it was very old, and old to me too. During my days as an undergrad in the erstwhile Presidency College, it had been the central room of the PCR. Just as it was now. The difference then was that the staff room was then a-bustle with the professors, their pets (I mean obsessive students here) and a number of others who were hanging around or working in some way for the professors. There was no central table. Actually there was, but it was practically divided into a number of shifting sections occupied by various student/teacher groups. At any given time, there was a class taking place on one end and a group of students waiting for some attestation on the other. In the corners would sit a number of people who didn’t need the attention of the center, and were engaged I their own work. Others roamed around the central table, careful not to disturb the ongoing class, or stood near the walls, wearing what they felt were appropriate versions of the studious expression.

Teachers and students constantly moved in or out through the two huge doors that adorned the right wall, and the single door that joined the other large room of the PCR to the main one. This second room had been partitioned. Not in the airtight way that cubicles are, but with head-high partitions that you could peek over but knew you shouldn’t. Teachers sat at tables, some chatting, some sipping tea, some getting disturbed by pesky students. Staff moved in an out. A dedicated staffer (I forget his name) had carved a niche for himself and his kettle and stove in a corner of the room, and prepared tea for the teachers on request. He even did so for us students when some large-hearted professor would offer us some.

But there was one thing that stood out more than anything else – light. There was light, lots of it. It shone through the windows, through the huge doors. It fell on tables, books, coffee cups and faces. It lit them up and gave them a warm human glow. It could be the blistering summer or a cool winter afternoon, but the light was always there. Natural, pure, and ever so reminiscent of the days gone by – the days of tall pillars, huge archways and all the natural glow that filtered in through these wide spaces. It set you at ease, made you feel at one with the place and made you want to wait a bit longer. No, there wasn’t any air conditioning. But it didn’t matter, because as students, air conditioning was associated with stuffy offices and stuffier bureaucrats. The PCR wasn’t such a foreboding abode of authority, but a place to seek out answers (get them checked basically!) and discuss them with the professors. And it was all made easier by the light that shone everywhere.

So yeah, it all boiled down to two things – people and light, specifically sunshine. You could flit through the light, between the tables, across the main room and out without anyone bothering to question you. Neither would you question yourself. Because it was all accepted. Imperfect, in so many ways, for you could collide with someone, knock over someone’s food/drink, or simply walk in on an ongoing class and disturb people. But it was all accepted, and that made you feel at ease. Yeah, people and light made you feel at ease.

Sitting that day in the air-conditioned main room didn’t make me feel uneasy. Part of it was because I’m now used to such rooms, and no longer fear them. But part of it was also because the room had a logic of its own now. The windows had been boarded up in the main room. The arranged tables no longer had the same old haphazard arrangement of chairs. They were now all prim and proper, as if waiting on a meeting. The almirahs, with their overflowing answer scripts and files were gone. The walls were now bare, covered only with the forced-upon heritage of black-and-white images. Images of great people, who studied and worked in environments they would today not recognize as belonging to that of the University. They stare down from the walls, trapped where they do not belong, like many of the portraits in the Harry Potter series. They, if anyone, would be feeling unease at what has become of their institution.

All of this gave an impression of a waiting room. In a sense, perhaps it was, since you waited here before moving into one of the chambers dedicated to the professors. Or for some professor to emerge from a chamber and talk to you regarding a certain assignment, term paper or presentation. Like ornate waiting rooms designed to impress the solemn power of the intellectual elite, it asked you to sit and contemplate upon the reality of your position, your task and the person whom you wished to meet. It was supposed to inspire silent awe.

To someone who has seen the same room in an older, less formal time though, it gave off a different vibe. The room was now dark, and could only be lit by some overhanging modernist lamps that neither played with the architecture nor the overall décor. The chairs, the framed pictures, the tables and the darkness all combined with the high ceiling to produce a sepulchral effect. It may have been a Church, and we the faithful waiting for our respective deacons. Nothing – neither the warmth of the sun, nor the chirping of birds, nor the unnecessary movement of staff or students, would disturb this hallowed ground. The air-conditioning suddenly made me feel cold, as if I was in a place that wasn’t part of the biosphere of life.

Beyond the sepulchral waiting room were the catacombs. Stairs and narrow corridors meandered off, flanked by chambers of the deacons. Most of the rooms, at any given time, were empty. Most of the professors, for some reasons unbeknownst to me, were never in their rooms. Nor did their rooms give the semblance of life. They were artificial and cold, as if emphasizing that they, and their occupants, had neither the need nor the patience for the trivialities of life. The imperfections that creep in to make brick and mortar, wood and metal human, were absent. The human touch was yet to permeate, and only the machine existed. To serve, and to impress. But not to love.

And amidst all this, there was no light. No natural, warm sunlight anyway. The fluorescent and the incandescent markers of the machine lit up the hallways. Warmer glows sometimes came from the halogen incandescence of chambers, but these were few and far between. Few of the chambers were blessed with natural light, it is true. But they were rare, and their inhabitants probably equated Vitamin D with melanoma. The result was that the huge hall broke into catacombs of artificial lighting where everything was present, except light and people.

To be honest, a Monday would never tolerate complete vacuum. Students came, stood around like moss that couldn’t take root, and then left. People came and went, and in between, were vast spaces of emptiness. The spaces were shifting, but they were vast. So vast that you could hear your own heartbeat if you listened carefully, and your footsteps echoed like those of a giant. All the while the cold air-conditioning told you that you – as life indeed – wasn’t welcome.

But maybe I exaggerate. Maybe the Monday afternoon just wasn’t the best time to visit this monument to emptiness. But emptiness was woven into the very fabric of the machine that was the PCR now. And like every machine, it would have its own logic. Truly, the logic of the old College PCR, with its many imperfections, was simple. It provided a space for the teachers to sit and rest and study, and gave the students a place where they could consult them if the need arose.

Had that changed ? My mind told me it couldn’t possibly have. After all, the students now coming in had similar needs and intentions. Then why the emptiness? Perhaps it was the need to create distance. Why? Perhaps because it was a university? Universities are meant to be hallowed ground, where the intellectual elite live and work for the betterment of humanity. These are hallowed beings, and they need their space. Like the cloisters of the monks of yore, they need the space of chambers and cubicles to contemplate and study. Students being guided through PhD need to have their discussions without a cacophony of voices all around. Above all, the prestige of the professors demands this space, since they are not meant to jostle with their elbows in the overpopulated country that is India.

Neither are they to be inconvenienced by their colleagues. Each is an island of his/her own, living in a world of study and contemplation which doesn’t need anything beyond the barest human interactions. Collaboration and cooperation would be voluntary, to be initiated as and when two occupants of different chambers decided they wanted to talk or work. It would not be forced on them, for that would ruin the delicate mental equilibria needed for research. Hence, they needed distance from their fellow human beings, and emptiness created this distance.

And it was a permanent distance. You could walk across the emptiness, but you would be swimming in an ocean. One man, or two, or five, cannot break this emptiness. It seeps through the walls, through the windows and the neon lamps. It makes interactions brisk and business-like, cold and calculated. It makes you want to leave after your discussion is done. There is now warmth, no glow and no human chaos to draw you in, nor repel you. Instead, the machine repels you with its very emptiness. Where you have the greatest space is the place where you cannot stay.

But I’ve seen other universities. They did not abhor the light of the sun, nor the contact of human with human. In fact, Calcutta University dumps multiple professors in a single room, and asks them to share computers, shelves and even cooling solutions like fans. Air conditioning is almost absent except in the meeting room. Yet such sharing brings forth banter and chatting, and if you barge in on them, you’d almost inevitably find them having a good laugh amidst mountains of work. Do students stand around as they did in the PCR ? No, but there is no waiting room, nor the need to climb multiple staircases when moving from one professor to another. Going from one end of the hallway to the other pretty much sums up the faculty list, and you can do so while admiring the view of the National Library.

So yes, universities aren’t as open as colleges, and their needs are different. But they don’t have to be cold and artificial areas where human life stands isolated amidst a sea of emptiness. Perhaps they should ideally be – for the reasons outlined above – but they don’t have to be. And when such a change takes place in an area you already know and have grown fond of, it is especially jarring. Whatever the ideal, it is never pleasant to feel isolated and cold in a place you knew was once warm and full of life.

Presently, the isolation broke with one bubble moving quickly through the emptiness. The professor I’d been waiting for had arrived. My reverie shattered, I realized the mundane letter I wanted signed had flown across the room. Quickly retrieving it, I ran after him, up the stairs and across the mezzanine floor.  The footsteps were deafening, admonishing me for being too cocky for the empty machine. Minutes later, the letter signed, I was out into the sunlight, the heat, the grime and the cacophony again. And despite the promise of air-conditioning, I didn’t want to go back.

It seems the favourite pastime of the average South East Asian regime is to go after one or another of its minorities, and while doing so, try to avoid international media attention. Whether it is the treatment of non-Bhumiputera groups by the Indonesian and Malayasian governments, or the treatment meted out to the Karen by Myanmar, or the treatment of Tamils by the Sri Lankan government (technically South Asia I know), there always seems to be some minority in need of being championed in the high towers of the UN. In each case, the reasons are different, and the contexts are complex. But the end result is a stream of refugees who inevitably end up on the shores of some other country, including those that implemented discriminatory policies against their own minorities. This is followed by some heart-wrenching narratives that seek to shore up support for the persecuted minority, so that the refugee burden can be shared with other “like-minded” countries.

Of course, this isn’t a solution, simply because the regimes that enforce such migrations through acts of omission and commission are seldom reformed. The bhumiputera policies implemented by the Malayasian government remain in force today, continuing inter-ethnic tensions between the majority Malays and the hitherto socially significant Chinese and Indian communities. In Myanmar, the persecution of the Karen brought about a bloody civil war, but little else. The junta didn’t change, nor did the policies. Now the junta has superficially given power over to Aun San Suu Kyi, but the internal dynamics of policy formulation remain the same. Indeed, if anything, the recent Rohingya crisis only serves to underline how meaningful change at the policy level is just not forthcoming in this part of the world. Instead, we are awash in propaganda campaigns that focus on whichever social group is being currently hounded.

This group, as of now, is the Rohingya. They’ve been dubbed the “most persecuted people in the world”, which would surely bring a wry smile to those who were till very recently living under the oppressive rule of the Taliban, or ISIS, or the various drug cartels that virtually control parts of LatAm. But we’re not here to compare and grade human suffering, since the fact of suffering is patent enough. That the Rohingya have been discriminated against and treated as pariah is not for anyone to debate, save by lack of common sense. Naturally, this has led to another propaganda campaign – and a counter-propaganda campaign by the Myanmar government – both of whom seek to place the blame on the opposite party. This would have been fine as long as, like the Karen and other groups that preceded them, the Rohingya had not ended up in India. But given that that is precisely what is happening (more on this later), we need to take a long hard look at what really is going on, and what should be our response.

First of all, let’s look at the vexed question of the origin of the Rohingya. The Rohingya claim that they arrived from parts of India long before the coming of the British, and had been settled in the regions today known as Rakhine and historically known as Arakan, for centuries. It is true that the Arakan rulers tended to maintain relations with the Sultans of Bengal, and even accepted vassal status during the 15th Century. They employed Muslims, who were skilled in statecraft, and they and their retainers lived in the modern Rakhine region since then. But as historians have pointed out, this group would form only a fraction of the total number of Rohingyas today, even if we take at face value the claim that the direct descendants of those who had lived during the Sultanate were still living as Rohingya in the region.

Much more important was the depopulation of the region by the Konbaung invasion of Arakan during the 18th Century. When the British eventually conquered the region, they sought to use the fertile valleys to enhance their tax-collection abilities. This could only be achieved if there was sufficient labour. Workers were brought from neighbouring areas to work the fields. These were usually Bengali Muslims, coming from a region already overpopulated, to a region which was then underpopulated. Over time, their number grew and they began to demand benefits from the British government, something their religious compatriots in other parts of India were also doing at around the same time. This alarmed the native Rakhine and other groups, who were Buddhists and therefore saw the growing Muslim population as a direct demographic threat to their claim over resources in the region. It didn’t help that the Bengali Muslim populace has historically had a higher population growth rate than the Rakhine, and this meant that their proportion grew steadily during the 19th Century. By the beginning of the 20th Century, conflict over land was becoming inevitable.

The Second World War and the Japanese occupation of the region proved to be a key event in the history of the Rohingya and the Rakhine. The Rohingya, by virtue of getting preferential treatment due to the traditional British policy of favouring minorities, strongly supported the British. The Japanese supported the Buddhists. The result was escalating conflict between the British-supported Rohingya V-Force (Volunteer Force) and the Buddhist groups organized with Japanese help. The British had hoped to use the Rohingya as a buffer shield against Japanese aggression. However, the sectarian nature of the conflict ensured that the V-Force used British arms to attack Rakhine villages, leading to an endless cycle of violence.

This violence convinced the Rohingya at large that they needed their own state. Demands for a separate region of northern Arakan were being raised since the early days of the 20th Century. They now merged with the Pakistan movement, only to be eventually disappointed by Jinnah, who had no wish of picking a fight with the Burmese government at a time when his moth-eaten state was just coming out of its cocoon. Thus disappointed, the Rohingya sent representatives to the Burmese Constituent Assembly and Parliament, demanding from U Nu recognition of the Rohingya as a separte group and a separate state for themselves. As one would expect of a Buddhist prime minister in a Buddhist-dominated country, U Nu largely ignored them. What hope remained of a mutually satisfactory solution ended with the coming of the military junta in 1962.

Since 1962, the junta has systematically ensured that the Rohingya are not allowed to become a political force in the Arakan region. This included denying them citizenship, access to government jobs and representation in the few representative organs that remained. Pogroms were organized against them, leading to cyclical exodii to neighbouring countries. This led the Rohingya to support practically every anti-junta movement there could be, whether it was the 8888 movement or Suu Kyi in the 1992 elections. This cycle continues today, even though the junta has relinquished formal power to Suu Kyi and a democratic process.

As the above narrative makes clear, the Rohingya are essentially ethnic Bengali Muslims who had settled in less populated lands of modern-day Myanmar, with a small portion of them going back further (and this being a matter of dispute). Their language, for all the talk of dialects, is Bengali, and their intellectuals maintained close links with the Muslim Bengali intellectuals during the Partition movement, and even after. In fact, this had led to the formation of an Arakanese version of the Muslim League in the 1940s. Their numbers, having grown exponentially, poses a threat to the demographic stability of the Arakan region, which has led indigenous groups like the Rakhine to protest, and then take up arms against them. The Myanmarese government, for its part, realized that this group was one that could not be assimilated within the logic of either Burmese nationalism (given their ties to Eastern Bengal) or Buddhist nationalism (they were Muslims). Hence, rather than keep a growing populace, they sought to extirpate them and disperse them to other regions. Dump their own perceived problem on others, in other words.

This has led to systematic persecution of the Rohingya. Beginning with denial into the officialdom of the junta state, this has reached the point of physical torture, rape, arson and other forms of assault on the Rohingya. The Rohingya, for their part, having exhausted options for peaceful protest, taken to the militancy. As with other Muslim groups who face persecution, their natural harbor has been the Islamist world of jihad. Ever since the 1980s, groups like the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO) have had jihadist links. Even recently, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) has shown itself to be a keen follower of the diktats of jihad, attacking both the Buddhists and the minuscule number of Hindus living in the region. Here, it should be pointed out, that the Hindus, like the Rohingya themselves, are a legacy of colonial rule. To attack a similarly placed social group makes no sense when seen from an ethnic minority’s viewpoint. But it does make sense when seen from a jihadist perspective.

It has been argued, with merit, that a persecuted people will fight back at a point of time. Democracy, when it functions properly, ensures that such problems are discussed and solved, and if not, brought before the public forum through protests and pressure groups. Myanmarese democracy, in the version that currently exists, has clearly failed the Rohingya. The Rohingya now want nothing to do with Myanmar’s democracy, and everything with finding a new home, and fighting back against the military and removing all except themselves from the Northern Arakan region. This has the potential of becoming a second civil war. If it does, it would ensure a swift demise for the democratic mechanism currently taking roots in the country, and further persecution and reprisals. This would produce more refugees, which is not good news for any of Myanmar’s neighbours.

Having established the ethnicity of the Rohingyas, their persecution at the hands of the Buddhist establishment and their attempts at fighting or fleeing, it is now time to turn to what India as a country should do. The most obvious answer to this would be to put diplomatic pressure on Myanmar to come to a solution. This is to pretend that India isn’t already doing what it can, or hasn’t in the past tried to influence the country. In the context of south Asian relations, Myanmar’s relations with India can be termed cordial, and while it may seem that the Indian state may be doing less than it should, one should remember that diplomatic pressure is probably not going to work anyway. Myanmar, like any small country with a xenophobic trait, is extremely sensitive to the Rohingya issue and did not think twice before bombing the Chinese border over the expulsion of groups of Chinese from the country. As for its non-Rohingya Indian populace, they have had to leave the country much earlier.

Hence, instead of doing anything for the Rohingya, any pressure on India’s part risks pushing Myanmar into the waiting arms of China, further isolating India in her immediate neighborhood. Hence, if Sushma Swaraj’s visit in March to Myanmar (and Modi’s in September last year) don’t yield anything beyond platitudes about how India believes the Rohingya would do best in Myanmar and there should be socio-economic development, don’t be surprised. You’re basically looking in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Given how this cyclical crisis isn’t going away (Myanmar has done nothing to fix its internal xenophobic traits, and has promised to take back only a minuscule number of Rohingya, who anyway do not wish to return), it should be worthwhile to look at what the crisis means for India. On the diplomatic level, India risks a full-scale spat between Bangladesh, which supports the Rohingya but shies away from accepting that they’re ethnic Bangladeshis, and Myanmar, which calls the Rohingya “Bengalis” and wants to send them back by the truckload into Bangladesh. Any spat could lead to the intervention of China, which would allow India’s arch-enemy another front in its attempt to seclude India. If Nepal is anything to go by, India should seek to ensure that any trouble, within or without a neighbouring state, doesn’t become an international issue.

But the Rohingya aren’t just a diplomatic problem. At places like Hili and Benapole in West Bengal and parts of Tripura, they’ve appeared at the border posts demanding entry. Note that these aren’t borders between India and Myanmar, but between India and Bangladesh. This naturally suggests that for all the wailing the Bangladeshi government is doing at the moment, they’re as interested as Myanmar in passing on the problem rather than solving it. When the Indian government sought to send them back, vested interests filed a case in the Supreme Court demanding (on legally dubious grounds) that India could not send the Rohingya back. The case in ongoing in the Supreme Court, with news of Rohingya atrocities against the Hindus bolstering the state’s case that the Rohingya present a security threat to India, alongside a demographic one.

It should be instructive at this point to see what the state’s arguments are. Firstly, it has argued that the Rohingya would affect the demographic makeup of the country. This may seem to be an overcautious approach given that the official UN figures for the number of refugees currently in the country hover in the range of 40,000. However, we have seen how a poor and largely illiterate populace like the Rohingya can grow in numbers, which contributed to the land problems in Rakhine in the first place. India, with its highly polarized communitarian social structure (which some would call communal), is sensitive to even fractional changes in the relative abundance of different religions. One can argue that this stems from the fierce conflicts over land in an overpopulated country, but we cannot change that. There are chances that as the numbers of the Rohingya grow, they will be polarized on issues of resource control to an extent where they become a political force by themselves.

This force, it should be remembered, wouldn’t exist in a vacuum. The recent events involving the killing of Hindus shows that the community has already been infiltrated by extremist groups pledging loyalty to jihadist outfits. In India, there is no dearth of sleeper cells that can further estrange them and create a homegrown security threat, an Indian version of ARSA. It is in this context that the government raised the security issue.

Now it has been argued that India has accepted other refugees in the past. Even if we set aside the flow of refugees into Punjab, and belatedly, into Bengal, at the time of partition, we can think of the coming of the Dalai Lama and then the influx that followed Operation Searchlight in the 1970s. In each case however, it should be remembered that the populace had a significant number of Hindus or Buddhists. The Hindus, by virtue of being a majority, managed to assimilate the newcomers, though this too caused significant problems for the state of West Bengal. The Buddhists, on the other hand, being a minority in the pan-Indian sense, posed little threat to demographic change beyond the immediate confines of Dharamsala.

The Rohingya case is different. They form part of the Bengali Muslim community for all practical purposes, and their influx would naturally bolster the number of the Muslim community in Bengal, and in India in general. Whether they are accepted whole-heartedly by the local Muslim populace is a different question. For the pan-Indian perspective though, this has the possibility of producing a demographic imbalance that could quickly spiral into communal violence. Given the growing communalization of politics under the NDA-II government, it is simply unwise to play with demographics even if it means helping a group that is truly in need of aid.

But can India do nothing ? For the most part, the answer is yes. However, India should not be averse to taking in limited numbers through a vetting process that allows us the best of the community in terms of what they can contribute to Indian society and economy. This involves creating vetting processes similar to those that exist in European countries, the crucial difference being that we should never commit to accepting a set number of refugees like Germany did. Instead, we should process cases for asylum based on individual requirements, backgrounds, criminal records, education and skills. This would naturally exclude a number from India, but I would argue that it is not in India’s interest to take in more unskilled farmers and poor labour, since India already has an abundance of those.

What would become of the remaining Rohingya ? Some of them are finding their way in through human trafficking channels. This must be stopped, to ensure the dignity of the humans themselves and also to prevent the same demographic imbalance from occurring through informal channels. The BSF and other agencies should have a clear mandate to search, arrest and throw out all Rohingya in border areas, and also in regions far away from the border, in the interests of the safety and the demographic balance of the country.

And what of the remainder, who are denied entry either formally or informally ? Indonesia and Malaysia have taken a sympathetic approach to the Rohingya problem, accepting a number into their own countries. Bangladesh, however, would perhaps be the most ideal destination. Not only was Bangladesh carved out with the express purpose of giving a homeland to the Bengali-speaking Muslims of eastern India, it claims to actually care for the Rohingya. Hence, both from an ethnic and a religious perspective, it is best that Bangladesh take the onus of accepting the majority of Rohingya refugees and integrating them within its society. India can support and even subsidize this process, as long as the country promises not to push the Rohingya into India through formal or informal channels.

By way of conclusion, it has to be admitted that it is hard to look on without acting as a humanitarian disaster unfolds near one’s country. This, in an age when rightist governments are actively talking of throwing out refugees and instituting travel bans on Muslim countries. India, with its diverse populace, needs to be sympathetic to the plight of the Rohingyas and do what it can to diplomatically solve the problem, but ensure that her concern doesn’t end up creating political, religious or demographic challenges for future generations. In other words, India must be sensible while being sensitive.