Last week’s headline news was the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. I’m no student of Indian politics so I’m not proposing to add much to the oceans of ink the media have spilled on the subject but I can’t help noting the ironies of life
Of Indira Gandhi’s two sons one was mainly interested in flying and the other in politics. So what happened? The political son became the victim of a plane crash while the pilot son became the victim of apolitical assassination Maybe if both had stuck to their original interests they would still be alive.
If this is just a small irony here’s a bigger one India has been a democracy relatively speaking ever since its independence. It is one of the few democracies in the world outside North America and Western Europe and that’s why it’s particularly said to see it slip into violence and chaos.
Still much as one despises political terrorism it shouldn’t blind one to the fact that India’s democracy as practiced by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has been a pretty authoritarian system of government. In the mid-1970s Mother Gandhi put nearly 30,000 of her political opponents into prison.
Rajiv himself was a democratic candidate murdered by a group of political militants undemocratic by definition. Democracy means popular representation of course; it means a political process ruled by the people. Yet in India a country of some 15 official languages one can’t help asking which people?
India may be a democracy but it’s hardly a country. It’s a political-dynastic idea borrowed one might add from the British. (Canada is also a political idea by the way even if on a less complex scale; and so are the Soviet Union Yugoslavia and several other member-countries of the United Nations).
This doesn’t mean that in such countries political violence and terrorism are acceptable but it does mean that counting votes may not be sufficient to make them truly democratic.
The politics of democracy may leave entire groups unrepresented in countries that lack the natural i.e. ethnic linguistic religious and cultural homogeneity of a true nation-state Sometimes natural or tribal ties are replaced by common geographic economic or political interests as in Switzerland; sometimes not. When they aren’t ruling cities usually try to glue these countries together by force with or without the mask of democracy.
It may be unfair to blame the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty for its authoritarian ways. Possibly a county like India cannot be held together by pure and ideal forms of democracy. (God knows even western democracies are far from being pure or ideal and as time goes by they’re becoming less ideal still.) In any event it would be naive to imagine that India can be governed by the same methods as Denmark
But while it may not be possible to hold India together except by a certain amount of authoritarianism it has always puzzled me why we see such an obvious merit in forcibly holding together geo-political entitles that won’t jell on their own. What is so big noble or practical about a country that doesn’t wish to be one?
I’m without sympathy for political assassins whether they’re Tamil Tigers Sikh nationalists or the FLQ. But I have a fair bit of sympathy for people who desire national independence I don’t know
Why Punjab (or Latvia or Quebec) should be part of some foreign national entity only to suit the political ambitions of a ruling dynasty or of an alien majority
It seems wrong to me to force an association on a distinct group even in its own economic interests as in the case of my Mizoram in India (or, arguably, in the case of Quebec). But the Baltic countries or independent Sikh Khalistan would probably be better off on their own even economically than they are now as Soviet or Indian provinces. Holding them in bondage with or without the frills of democracy serves only their dynastic (or popular-majority) masters. It doesn’t serve them as a people.
Imperial visions breed violence. They don’t excuse terrorism but they do make it pretty inevitable. In this sense Rajiv Gandhi was a victim of his own family’s policies. The bankruptcy of the Gandhi clan’s Congress (I) Party by the way is illustrated by the choice of Rajiv’s widow. Sonia Gandhi as new leader wisely she turned them down. For as attractive and capable as this Italian-born lady may be it is highly questionable that of India’s 900 million inhabitants she would have been best qualified to lead the country.
Living in glass houses one shouldn’t throw stones I suppose. Much closer to home the Republican Party’s choice of Dan Quayle as vice president could give rise to a similar question.
George Jonas in Toronto Sun
Article extracted from this publication >> June 7, 1991
