There is India and there is Bharat. How often have we been told that? RSS chieftain Mohan Bhagwat is only the latest in a long line of people who have trotted out this theory. Though he was talking about rape, informing us sagely that rapes happen only in India, rarely in Bharat, the sub-text was clear (and hardly original): India is a cold, cruel place, a foreign import, while Bharat is warm, humane and imbued with sanskriti (culture). Naturally, evil doers like rapists have no place in the Bharat scheme of things.
The two-nation thesis is an old one. It goes back to before India’s Independence, when Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru argued about the direction the country should take once the British had left. For Gandhi, “Real India” lived in its lakhs of villages and, conversely, the cities were a Western construct where the individual was dehumanised. He was not so much obsessed with religious or cultural tradition, but wanted an economy based on small enterprises. “If the village perishes India will perish too,” he wrote. These small, self-contained villages would lead to “Ram Rajya”, though he was careful enough to say he did not mean Hindu Raj but Divine Rule, in short, a perfect world.
Nehru on the other hand, charged with socialist and more importantly modernist ideals, dreamt of an India humming with factories and big industries, dams and steel mills. He had seen Europe and the United States and most of all the Soviet Union, where industrialisation had brought prosperity and power. We think of him as a romantic, but Nehru was pragmatic enough to know that an India without a gigantic economy to back it up would remain a weak nation and such an economy could only be built with investments in industry.
There was a third interventionist in this debate. B.R. Ambedkar was totally against the village. He called it a “den of inequity and localism” and exhorted his followers to migrate to the cities in large numbers. As a child, he had felt the deep prejudices in a caste-ridden village society and after his experiences in London and New York had come to the conclusion that the city was an anonymous place where caste would not matter.
Post-Independence India was thus torn between these conflicting ideologies. Nehru won the battle on the economy, but his government poured money into rural programmes and the political establishment soon learned the art of paying lip service to the idea of how villages were very important. The village was soon romanticised to the extreme. Popular culture — cinema, for instance — picked up the theme and began churning out films about how the village was populated by simple and innocent folk who were routinely cheated by the villainous and devious city slickers. Here, too, sometimes the Hindi filmmakers got it right — in a village society, the zamindar, the cop, the priest and the politician were all a cabal who conspired to take advantage of the poor farmer (and sometimes, Mr Bhagwat please note, even sexually assault a village lass).
As India has urbanised over the past few decades, some of these tropes have faded away. The village disappeared from Hindi films for a few years and has now returned, but as a menacing, sinister place. The city has its dark side, but is also a place of romance and opportunity. Most of all, it has glamour.
Why focus on cinema alone? Villagers today want to move to the city in ever large numbers, drawn by jobs and the chance to make good in life. There are families who have lived in the city for four, even five generations. A “native place” , where grandparents live, could now mean a suburb in another part of Mumbai or Delhi. The connection with the village is breaking. For millions of those who live in cities, the village is now an alien idea — some reject it, others indulge in fond nostalgia for it by going for rural holidays or building farm houses. But it is not part of everyday life.
The RSS, right from the beginning, has been enamoured of the village. M.S. Golwalkar, the second Sarsanghchalak (supreme chief) of the RSS, too wanted to develop the village economy because it signified tradition in the narrowest possible sense. “Ram Rajya” for the RSS meant a society run by and for the Hindus where marginalised sections like dalits and Muslims knew their place and the caste system was the natural order of life. This harks back to a mythical Golden Era of India, when this nation was on top in the world. And in that Golden Era, there were no rapes; that is a cultural pollutant (like homosexuality) that entered Bharatvarsh when foreign invaders and traders —like the Mughals and the British — came in. This was a place where the women were beauteous and the men noble. In short, a perfect world straight out of Amar Chitra Katha.
As we know, this is blatantly untrue. No culture has a monopoly on goodness, but more importantly, heinous crimes like rape are also not confined to one society or another. In modern India, rapes happen in the cities and in the villages. Rape is about power and this is amply borne out by the instances of rapes of dalit women by upper caste men. Khap Panchayats with their antediluvian ideas about a woman’s place in the world or about inter-caste marriages, often enforced by violent means, are not urban entities but are found in rural areas. There is much that is wrong with the city, but with all its faults, it remains a place where modernity thrives and where many of the social evils of the village society have been eradicated.
We can fantasise about Golden Bharatvarsh, but we know that it is never going to come back, that is if it ever existed. But by invoking this ridiculous notion of two Indias, one malevolent and the other pristine, one foreign and the other somehow truly Indian, one where rapes occur routinely and the other where they never do, we are burying our heads in the sand. We are ignoring the large-scale exploitation of the poor, the marginalised and the weak by the powerful. That is not an India we want. The performance put up by BJP and RSS spokespersons on television to defend the RSS chief was creditable, but surely even they know that what was said was indenfensible. It makes a mockery of all those women who have been raped in all those villages over the years. Is the BJP happy doing that?