Ramachandra Guha on the difference between Tagore & Gandhi as well as India, Pakistan & Bangladesh - At least as enunciated by its leading thinkers, Indian independence movement was not animated by a blind or excessive sense of victimhood. Claims for swaraj from the British Raj did not deflect reformers from the need to cure the manifest ills of their society. Late 19th century thinkers such as Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Jotiba Phule knew that discrimination against low castes and women was not the fault of the white colonizer, but a product of traditional Indian customs and practices. This open-minded orientation was carried forward by influential nationalists in the 20th century. Rabindranath Tagore argued that Indians should glory in the illumination of lamps lit everywhere in the world. When, in the 1920s, Gandhi’s movement seemed to be taking a xenophobic turn, the Poet issued the Mahatma a series of stinging rebukes, which hit their mark. Gandhi began a course of self-correction, which led him to stop demonizing Western ideas and institutions. By the 1930s he was saying that, after Independence, he would ‘love’ to see India become an ‘equal partner with Britain, sharing her joys and sorrows’. Pakistan on the other hand is very clearly a ‘victim nation’ that attributes its ‘misfortunes to others and ignores or disregards failings closer to home. Those who led the movement for a Muslim homeland in the 1940s did so on the grounds that if India was to be given independence as a single country, the Hindus in general—and the wily Brahmins and the greedy Banias in particular—would persecute those of other faiths. Six-and-a-half decades after the creation of Pakistan, a sense of victimhood persists. Many Pakistanis still blame foreigners for their troubles. Some demonize India, while an equal (or possibly greater) number demonize America. The bad Hindu neighbour and the worse Christian superpower are held responsible for sectarian violence, political instability, economic insecurity, and more-or-less everything else. Forty-two years after Independence, Bangladesh remains to some extent a victim nation. The memories of Pakistani brutality persist, and are often invoked in popular discussion. To these are added complaints of more recent origin, against the overbearing attitude of Big Brother India. Even so, my sense is that the Bangladeshi intelligentsia is more willing to acknowledge the domestic sources of their nation’s problems. Witness the vigorous civil society organizations in the country, which have done groundbreaking work in microcredit, rural health care, and women’s education. That the social work sector is so much weaker in Pakistan is partly a consequence of the continuing tendency of Pakistanis to blame other nations for their misfortunes.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 17:32:12 +0000
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