Bharat is India in the making

Despite the storm it provoked, Mohan Bhagwat’s sweeping comment about “India” and “Bharat” wasn’t without a small kernel of truth. It recalled for me a remark by the 13th Duke of Bedford, who died in 2002, that “living in an English way is more important in India today than it ever was in the times of the British Raj.”

Where the RSS chief was totally wrong was in claiming a geographical and cultural divide. What is factually true of India is aspirationally true of Bharat. They appear different only because Bharat, being the poorer and less developed half, usually can’t afford what richer India has already achieved. Delhi’s December 16 gangrape tragedy emphatically proved that the two entities overlap and are inextricably linked.
The victim’s father in Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, is quoted in two British newspapers as saying there was “no question of her marrying” the 28-year-old youth she was with “because we belong to different castes”. That, at once, placed the family firmly in the bosom of the eternal, unchanging Bharat Mata whom Bhagwat eulogises although the crime took place in the heart of modern India’s national capital.
Some might argue that the father belongs to traditional Bharat where he lives. His daughter, being a physiotherapy student, had shifted to India. However, the caste restriction shows she, too, is a Bharatiya in some respects. The two are intimately, even inextricably, linked.
Our towns and cities are not self-contained urban fortresses. Rustic folk who haven’t severed the umbilical chord with the village inhabit urban slums. Most of the urban poor pop off every so often to the muluk. They have parents and siblings there, often also wives and children. India is interconnected. Apart from those who migrated from Sindh, West Punjab or East Bengal, the rich, too, retain ancestral links with the village.
The topography and demographics of our cities are revealing. Even Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh has its slums which are islands of rural Bharat in urban India. In fact, slum populations grow faster in the newly industrialising towns. As for Delhi, Singapore’s high commission in Chanakyapuri has complained for years about Sanjay Camp, the nearby slum. Another adjoins the American School in Chandragupta Road, also in Chanakyapuri. A third Delhi slum was reported to be coming up behind the MPs’ quarters in South Avenue.
Kolkata has the highest number of rural people. Apart from the million or so who sleep on its pavements and send most of their savings back to the village, one-third of the city’s population lives in bustees. A survey showed that even some major thoroughfares had only a fringe of brick dwellings. Behind them were not only huts but a rural lifestyle with livestock and poultry. Mumbai comes next. Dharavi, spread over 557 acres and housing nearly 300,000 people, is no longer Asia’s largest slum. Mumbai has at least four larger contenders for the dubious title, some three times the size of Dharavi.
Inter-dependence is one reason why campaigns to clear slums or drive out migrants fail. India can’t do without Bharat. In turn, Bharat needs India. Call them bustee, jhuggi-jhopri, shantytown or cheri, these squalid townships house the servants and service-providers without whom city-dwellers would be lost. One estimate says India has 40.3 million urban slum-dwellers. The gangrape accused are among them, residents of South Delhi’s unsanitary Ravi Dass Colony.
Bhagwat may appear to be on firmer ground if he means Bharat and India have different lifestyles. Again, the difference is illusory. Thanks to television advertising coupled with tax exemption on agricultural income, there is a ready market in the countryside for all the consumer products (cosmetics, showy accessories and household goods) that RSS diehards might claim to disapprove of. Bharatiyas buy as much as they can afford.
Their lifestyle is changing. Watching me tying my dhoti for Madhavrao Scindia’s daughter’s wedding in Gwalior, the jawan attached to my guest house suite remarked he hadn’t witnessed a dhoti being tied since his grandfather died. Given the popularity of salwar-kameez outfits, pants and Western dresses among our smart young women, I wonder if Elizabeth Hurley and Cherie Blair won’t be the last women in saris!
Singaporeans used to wonder during the Asian Values debate if they couldn’t be modern without being Western. The question isn’t even asked here. Students of society will regard that the real problem. Silly boasts about the supposedly superior morality of a mythic Bharat only make it more difficult to address the real challenge.
The RSS chief isn’t the first to let imagination and ideology run away with commonsense. An earlier email on a lurid orange and yellow background had informed me that the “only solution (to rape) is Hindu Rashtra”.
Nor are the Ballia Pandeys the only family to straddle India and Bharat. I knew an RSS veteran who was never seen (at least in this country, call it what you will — Bharat or India) except in dhoti, kurta, jawahar coat and slippers. His son sported T-shirt, designer jeans and chunky trainers, and his son-in-law managed that quintessential symbol of thrusting new India, a five-star hotel.
Once, a swarajist worthy condescended to break bread with me. After a lot of cogitation, he decided that a particular Chinese restaurant in a big hotel would provide vegetarian food as well as the anonymity he desired. We entered the restaurant to find some ideological brethren of his had booked the next table for a party. It was too late to turn round and go away. We ate in strained silence.
For good or for bad, Bharat is only India in the making. The Duke of Bedford was speaking of the aspirations of Indians as a whole.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author