Keep the change
Jug Suraiya, Times of India 12 Nov 2008

Barack Obama stands for change. That’s why we in India love him. Or do we? Is India’s honeymoon with Obama over before it began? Some of the US president-elect’s off-the-cuff remarks have raised hackles in South Block. No, it’s got nothing to do with Obama’s repeated remarks about America’s need to cut down on outsourcing in order to protect American jobs, nor has it to do with the likelihood that he might reduce the number of H1B visas.

Everyone — including Obama himself — realises that, political rhetoric apart, an antioutsourcing policy will make the US even less competitive on shrinking global markets than it already is. Equally, the US needs, perhaps now more than ever, the injection of intellectual capital that skilled immigrants provide.

No, what got India’s foreign affairs mandarins’ kachhas in a twist was Obama’s remark that his administration might play a more active role in helping India to resolve the Kashmir issue; there was a suggestion that former president Bill Clinton might be roped in for the task. The utterance of the unmentionable K-word predictably set the cat among the pigeons in official circles in India, which let the US president-elect know in no uncertain terms that never mind the actual territory of Kashmir, the K-word itself was offlimits to third-party busybodies like him.

This bristling response to even the mildest proposal that perhaps New Delhi might like to do some rethinking on Kashmir is not restricted to officialdom; many, if not most, Indians feel that Kashmir is, or ought to be, a closed book, and any attempt to open it, by Indians or by outsiders, immediately compromises India’s national security and sovereignty. Even after more than 60 years of conflict — in which the worst sufferers have been the Kashmiri people, both embattled Muslims and exiled Hindus — any attempt to introduce a new perspective to the problem is summarily chucked out of court,as the thin edge of a wedge which would eventually and inevitably balkanise India.

But as central as it seems to be to our emotional reflexes, Kashmir is only the symptom of a much deeper underlying condition: an ingrained and systemic resistance to change. Sociologists divide societies into two broad categories: dynamic and static. Dynamic societies are those which are socially fluid and which thrive on change. Static societies are based on rigid hierarchies and are self-protectively inimical to change.

If we accept Obama’s example as an ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin to White House’ story, America’s is a dynamic society, both driven by and driving change. If we take India’s 60-year-old K-word syndrome as a test case, ours remains a static society, cosmetic changes notwithstanding.

Yes, India is one of the world’s most ebullient democracies, where the electorate enthusiastically chucks out governments at the drop of a ballot. But despite this surface hustle and bustle, the more things that seem to change in India, the more they remain the same. Yes,we have a Dalit woman chief minister.Yes,women, at least in the cities, can literally and metaphorically wear the pants in the family and work at jobs ranging from flying jetliners to helping defend the country’s borders as officers in the defence services.

But under this swift flowing current lies an ancient and untouched bedrock of patriarchal feudalism, a deep-seated and often violent resistance to change, where female infanticide, caste carnage and so-called ‘honour-killings’ cruelly give the lie to the India Winning of the 21st century.

Scant months after boxer Vijender Singh brought an Olympic bronze home to his Haryana village of Kaluvas, two girls were burned alive by their relatives. Their ‘crime’? Visiting some boys on Diwali, thus bringing ‘shame’ to the family. Though a lone villager has filed a complaint, the local police have done little or nothing for a fortnight after the incident. Why should they? Such instances are commonplace ‘family affairs’ in the moon-bound India of Chandrayaan-1.

In diehard India, murder won’t out. Nor will the K-word. Change? Sure, it’s great. So long as others keep it, and don’t try to foist it on us.

secondopinion@timesgroup.com

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