April.24 : Arguing with a Pakistan-leaning friend I conceded that Indians should stop insisting that Pakistan rejoin India — it would be best if India rejoined Pakistan.
Subsequently, I thought but didn’t say, the majority could decide on the nation’s name, capitol and secular Constitution. She didn’t quite know what to make of it, having strenuously and consistently opposed the proposition that Pakistan had proved itself unviable by being ruled by its Army for most of its existence and by now 60 years on having to fight a major internal war to settle the nature of its statehood.
What then could I say for India? It is corrupt and has demonstrably sidelined and even murdered sections of its minorities, is still defaced by poverty, inequality and has its own brands of fanaticism...! I fell back, not disingenuously, on the usual suspect arguments: that India is dynamically, if unfairly and corruptly, capitalist (which of course raises the question of whether any transition to capitalism has been without its concomitant cruelties, mass slavery, enclosures, gulags, state terror, starvation and revision of all morality) and that it is a rambling democracy. I pointed out that the rise to power of a party that represents the dalit population (and the politically-correct outlawing of any reference to the former designations of these communities) is a massive achievement of the democratic process. The same process has, in waves, given voice to sections of the population which, for hundreds of years under conqueror and colonial rule, have suffered, at best, neglect and at worst an imprisonment in an unsustaining form of existence.
Democracy was the hero of my argument, along the lines of the best-worst system the human race has invented. The irony, which didn’t escape me, was that when I had the opportunity to vote as an Indian citizen, I didn’t. I abstained, and with others of my small and pretentious tribe, argued against parents, teachers and others that parliamentary democracy was a bourgeois sham, an opiate of the people and other unacceptable things.
I continued in that view when I became eligible to vote in British elections. As a student first and then an immigrant it seemed that the arguments of national policy didn’t concern me but were for or against me and my presence — mostly against.
It was an era of what has been labelled “mass immigration” from the ex-colonies of Britain, successively independent nations in the subcontinent, Africa and then the West Indies. The adjective “mass” wasn’t quite justified. Even today, three or four decades later, the number of people and their descendants from those ex-colonies is at the most 3.5 million out of a population of 62 (different quotes for different votes, of course. The British fascists double and treble the figures).
In ’68 a powerful Conservative politician called Enoch Powell gave a speech in which he said he saw “rivers of blood” staining the Thames. It was demagoguery of the worst sort and, what’s more, didn’t work. He thought he would ride to the leadership on the winged horse of prejudice. The winged horse in the Britain of the day turned out to be a cabined and confined lame donkey and carried poor Enoch out of British politics. At the same time, a Labour government with James Callaghan as home secretary passed, on the hoof, emergency legislation to deny East African Asians who held British passports the right of entry into the UK. Idi Amin was expelling Asian settlers from Uganda. When they arrived here they were put in detention camps to ensure “orderly release” into settlement.
Enoch’s well-chosen inflammatory phrases and Callaghan’s hasty ban may not have had any lasting impact on British history, but they certainly defined and exacerbated racial tensions at the time.
Who then could one vote for? Better to join and work with extra-parliamentary agitational groups. I did and so did thousands of others, but that’s another story.
The general election takes place in Britain on the 6th of May. For the first time in any UK election, the sitting Labour Prime Minister has agreed to televised debates against the leaders of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Opposition.
The first of these debates, watched by an estimated 10 million people, took place on April 15. What has hitherto been a lacklustre election suddenly took on interesting possibilities as the public opinion polls immediately after the debate pronounced that Nick Clegg, the leader of the minority Liberal Democratic Party, had emerged as the favourite, above Prime Minister Gordon Brown and David Cameron the Conservative leader. The subsequent opinion-surveys put the Liberal Democrats a clear second above the ruling Labour Party.
The second TV debate is to take place tonight (the column was filed on Thursday evening), but if Clegg’s charisma holds, the election will be thrown wide open. A Liberal Democrat challenge to either of the main parties in select constituencies will result in a Parliament with no clear majority party and then, as in recent Indian general elections, the horse-trading will begin. This will entail, as in all moves towards coalitions, a trade-off of power and policies.
As of now, the Labour Party is willing to concede to the Lib-Dems a constitutional change which will bring in the system of proportional representation in subsequent elections, replacing the first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all system that obtains today.
For the first time in the run-up to this election the Conservatives have reason to worry. Their calculations had put them far ahead of Labour and they had assumed that the Lib-Dems would be marginalised in an election in which the population would entrust the precarious economy to one of the experienced parties. Mrs Cameron was virtually looking through Harvey Nichol’s catalogues to choose curtain colours for 10 Downing Street.
It may be that Mr Clegg’s popularity is temporary and a reflection of the disgust that the general population feels for politicians — the Lib-Dems can still maintain that the other two parties have made the mess from which they will extract the nation and that they are the only ones not in thrall to capitalist forces on the one hand and union influence on the other. It’s a persuasive contention and is flying at present, but could crash in the volcanic ash thrown up by the debates to come.
Farrukh Dhondy
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