Is India splitting up emotionally?

States taking measures to protect their ethnicity and treating other settlers as outsiders poses a cultural and demographic challenge

and the blanking out of even a video link with a controversial author, are disgracing the country.

The standard explanation of politicians - that these steps are unavoidable because the books and works of art hurt religious sentiments - is a throwback to the silencing of Galileo in 1633 because his claim that the earth moved round the sun offended orthodox Christians. It took the church four centuries to apologise for its mistake. Similarly, the value of diverse vote-banks is so high for Indian politicians that it may take a long time for them to see the folly of their pandering to fanatics.

The value of diverse vote-banks is so high for Indian politicians that it may take a long time for them to see the folly of their pandering to fanatics.

The latest rumpus concerning Salman Rushdie took place, therefore, in conditions vastly different from what they were in 1988. Sadly, however, the new circumstances have not all been positive. While the country has changed with the appearance of a vocal middle class and intelligentsia, a thriving free press, a powerful Supreme Court and Election Commission, the political class, unfortunately, has retained its nervous pusillanimity of the past. There is little evidence that it has the courage of its convictions where its liberal pretensions are concerned.

This is not the only backward step which the country has taken. Unlike 1988, when Sikh anger was an exception and Muslim disquiet was fanned by bigots - even if both were the fallout of political miscalculations - the fundamentalists have gained ground as never before. As a result, the banning of books, the hounding of artists into exile, the vandalising of libraries, the peremptory deletion of passages from university syllabi tremor of magnitude 6 or more could lead to the dam collapsing and threatening its structure thus causing serious concern to the 50 lakh people who live downstream; tremors in the vicinity of the dam have been noted recently.

It will be naïve, therefore, to expect any respite from a spectacle such as that of Hindu zealots sending M.F. Husain into exile to protect Hindu sentiments, or Muslim bigots keeping Rushdie out of India for hurting Muslim sentiments, or Marathi chauvinists attacking the Bhandarkar Research Institute in Pune for allowing James W. Laine to work on his biography of Shivaji there, or Shiv Sena activists forcing the Bombay University vice-chancellor to drop Rohinton Mistry’s Such A Long Journey from the syllabus for making disparaging remarks about the Sainiks, and their Hindutva counterparts ensuring that A.K. Ramanujan’s various versions of the Ramayan are omitted from Delhi University’s reading list. Clearly, the world’s largest democracy, has become the stomping ground of the fundamentalists of many hues, each of whom can easily persuade a wimpish government to ban a book or harass an artist to ensure that the communities which they claim to represent are not displeased. None among the politicians has the courage to ask whether the zealots speak for their entire communities lest their parties fall foul of them at election time.

It has been left, therefore, to the intelligentsia to ask this crucial question. The judges too have occasionally tried to introduce an element of sanity by saying, as the Supreme Court did, that a nonagenarian artist like Husain had the right to live and paint in his own country and that the ban on Laine’s book should be lifted. But the politicians can afford to ignore them because, first, the power of decision-making is in their hands and, secondly, they are thick-skinned enough to brush off any jibes.

The High Court in Gujarat has recently declared Hindi to be a “foreign language” where Gujaratis are concerned. The reason cited is that state-run primary schools teach in Gujarati. Farmers from Junagadh were objecting to a notification published by the National Highways Authority of India concerning the widening of a national highway. The notification had been published in Hindi which the farmers claim is unintelligible to them.

Hindi is the most widely spoken language in India for simple conversational purposes, thus making it India’s lingua franca. However, that does not mean that people outside the Hindi region can read official documents in Hindi. Widely-spoken Hindi has absorbed words from Turkish, Persian. Arabic and English. It is the language of the Hindi movies. Movie Hindi (or call it Hindustani or Urdu) is widely understandable in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Another such interstate quarrel is the Madhei River diversion dispute between Goa and Karnataka. The westflowing Mhadei river, which reaches the sea in Goa as the Mandovi River, has its headwaters in Karnataka. It is Goa’s lifeline in that water-deficient state. Karnataka has initiated work on the Kalasa-Bandura Nala project which proposes to supply drinking water to several cities (Hubli-Dharwar, Belgaum and Gadag) in Karnataka.

The plan involves building barrages across the Kalasa and Banduri tributaries and diverting water to the eastflowing Malaptabha River. By reversing the natural direction of flow, Goa would be deprived of the Madhei water.

When the current Maharashtra Assembly MLAs took their oath, a Samajwadi Party member Abu Azmi was attacked by Raj Thackeray, leader of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena Party for not taking his oath in Marathi, but in Hindi.

When the current Maharashtra assembly MLA’s took their oath, a Samajwadi Party member Abu Azmi was attacked by Raj Thackeray, leader of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena Party for not taking his oath in Marathi but in Hindi. Raj Thackeray had sometime earlier been attacking Hindispeaking Biharis for coming to Mumbai.

The Mullaperiyar dam was built 116 years ago. Following the reorganisation of states on a linguistic basis, the dam got located in Kerala but continued to provide large quantities of water to Tamil Nadu.

The Kerala and Tamil Nadu governments are in dispute about the dam. An Empowered Committee (EC), led by the former Chief Justice of India, A.S. Anand, is looking into the issue. The Kerala government has asked the Empowered Committee to demand that the Tamil Nadu government lower the storage level of the dam from 136 ft. to120 ft. till a new dam is constructed.

The reason cited by Kerala is that a

On the 9th of December 2011, a devastating fire ripped through AMRI which is an upmarket hospital in Kolkata claiming 90 lives. The managerial staff of the hospital were arrested. But also arrested were some members of the board of the company that ran the hospital. These all happened to be Marwaris, an immigrant group from Rajasthan, who have made Kolkata their home for generations.

Amongst these are six individuals who claim not to have anything to do with the day-to-day running of the hospital. They pleaded not to be sent to jail. The FICCI (The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry), India’s peak industrial body, appealed to the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, to arrange for their release but she has refused ob the grounds that the law should take its course.

Marwaris now feel insecure in West Bengal and have begun to resign from company directorships. This could drive a long-settled entrepreneurial community out of the state.

If every Indian state treats Indians who do not belong to the ethnic communities of that state as outsiders, then the protagonists of chauvinism will have won.