Let us hold our heads high
By Manohar Malgonkar

EVER since Kargil began, like everyone else in the subcontinent, I became a positive glutton for news. I began to spend long hours in front of the magic box, impatiently surfing the major news channels in an effort not to miss the summations of the pandits of the media of what was happening in Kashmir. Every day that passed without a declaration of war was something to be thankful for.

In early July, the tension began to ease, and there were news bulletins on the BBC and CNN without so much as a mention of Kargil. In this sort of situation, no news means good news. For the time being, war had been averted. Common sense told us that there would be a few aftershocks — if only as face-saving exercises, but these we had learned to live with. From now on one could confront the TV set without that knot of anxiety in the pit of one’s stomach, take a wholesome interest in what was happening in the rest of the world which Kargil had blocked out for close to two months.

That world was still very much there and, as usual, a lot was happening in it. Pride of place in the BBC and CNN news bulletins was still given to Kosovo which, so the spin doctors never tired of telling us, had been nearly brought to a state of normalcy except that the people still lived in tents, on doled out food and guarded by an army of occupants which itself bickered over chains of command and areas of control. In Northern Ireland, Tony Blair had brought about a shotgun truce between the Protestants, the Catholics and their militant wings — or had he? Famine raged in Sudan, and Bihar had its worst floods in years, but there were equally serious floods in Bangladesh, China, and of all places, Japan — surely, Japan didn’t even have rivers big enough to cause floods?

In short, business as usual. But wait, something quite unprecedented was taking place in that bastion of Islamic orthodoxy, Iran. University students in Teheran had come out in the streets, yelling slogans and setting fire to buses, demanding a relaxation of the press laws, and to protest against the prohibitions which laid down rules as to what clothes they must wear, what books they must read, what songs they could sing. This was nothing short of heresy, a gesture of defiance against the Ayotollahs, a recantation of the Islamic revolution.

And as such, a movement to be stamped down with determination. So the right-wing elements in Iran organised a counter-demonstration. People were brought in hired buses from distant parts of the country to participate in a mammoth procession to express their resentment against the student agitation and, on the contrary, to express solidarity and support for the same things that the students were agitating against. They carried slogans saying: Death to America. Death to Israel!

Here was the classic confrontation: dogma against common sense, orthodoxy against liberalism. It had happened before only ten years earlier, in China, and there the communists had stamped it down with brute force. Here the mullahas had their own methods which were just as ruthless. A counter protest march by the believers. In speech after speech they extolled the religious heads of the country and condemned the students for being dissatisfied with the rules regulating their lives. The paradox was that for me ( and, I sincerely hope for most of those who watched this counter-demonstration on TV) it actually succeeded in making the points of the student demonstration far more forcefully than the students themselves had done.

On the TV screen, the protest march of Iran’s rightists looked like any other procession; a packed mass of humanity moving along a city street, like a sluggish river. Except that this procession contained a huge dark patch, a black shadow, right at its centre. It moved forward like something carried by the current, looking ominous. It was only after the main portion of the procession came closer to the TV cameras that the viewers realised what the moving black mass was: It was formed by the women participants, thousands of them, and all of them dressed in black — black robe, black shoulder cloth, black scarf wound tightly round the head so that much of the face was hidden.

That a nation’s rulers should compel its women to go about looking like crows was surely a crime against womanhood itself? Should not the women of Iran have backed the agitating students instead of the religious leaders who had dictated that they must not appear in the streets in any other clothes but this uniform of shrouds and veils? — was this not a denial of a woman’s natural instinct — to wear colourful clothes, ornaments, makeup — to make herself look beautiful?

And to think that even these women of Iran condemned by the whim of some religious rule-maker to go about their business wearing nothing but black, would have been thought to be too forward in other Islamic lands, such as Afghanistan where, they would not have been allowed to parade in the streets at all, even as black shrouds.

I watched in spellbound disbelief, thinking: This surely was George Orwell’s 1984 transposed to 1999, with faith substituting for Communism and the Big Brother with the moustache replaced by a man with a turban and beard, in absolute control of every aspect of human life. And in the wake of that thought came a surge of sheer relief, that these same rules did not apply in our country. Here college girls need not wear black shrouds and cover their heads; here the police don’t have the power to march you off to the prison for not keeping a beard or for watching football at the hour of prayers. Here secularism was not merely election-time rhetoric but a heritage — something that was a fact of history before they could have devised a word to describe it: secularism. Only in India we have had heads of state who did not belong to the religion of the majority. Can you imagine a Hindu or a Sikh captaining the Pakistani cricket team? To see secularism in practice, first see a TV play on Pakistani TV or a film made in Pakistan. Not a single un-Islamaic name involved in its making. It is as though the ultimate in ethnic cleansing — the dream of Serbia — has been already achieved.

And then watch the credits roll after an Indian film. About half the stars, directors, technicians, singers are Muslims.

Here different religions have lived side by side — if not in complete amity, at least in a spirit of tolerance. There have been Christians ever since Christianity began and Jews even before the Christians came. There were Arab colonies in Malabar before the Arabs became Muslims. Here Buddha was born and propagated a new faith. Here the Parsis were given asylum and kept their sacred fire burning. Here the Sikhs have made their home. Oh, yes, there are differences among these different races; at that, in what other country do so many diverse faiths live together with so civilised a dismissal of their racial prejudices?

A glaring and, fortunately, also gorgeous example of India’s living secularism is the actress Shabana Azmi. I don’t believe that anyone thinks of her as either Muslim or Hindu as, to all appearances, she herself doesn’t. Those who saw her on BBC’s Hard Talk, being interviewed by Tim Sebastian could not fail to have been impressed by her performance. Sebastian has a way of asking prying questions which often have the effect of making his interviewees squirm and lose their cool. Azmi proved a match for him. She was poised and relaxed and full of confidence. She was dressed as though she was going to attend a wedding ceremony, in a rich silk sari and loaded with jewellery and with a prominent tikka on her forehead. She stoutly defended her role as a lesbian in a recent film, Fire.

It is not easy to think of someone like Azmi muffled up in black robes and veiled, shuffling along in a procession carrying placards saying: Death to America. Death to Israel. One shudders to think of the punishment a religious court would award for her flagrant violation of the rules of behaviour for ladies in Islamic countries: for appearing on British TV dressed up as a Hindu bride and, even more shockingly, defending her role as a lesbian.

In this country, they have had the good sense to nominate Azmi to the Rajya Sabha, the highest legislative council in the land.