To foil the nationalist narrative
When the democratic world was pleading with Zia-ul-Haq to spare Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s life, the Indian government, in which Vajpayee was minister of external affairs, remained aloof. India refused to intervene with Islamabad on the issue. It was payback time when Zia nominated Mr Vajpayee’s PM, Morarji Desai, for Pakistan’s highest civilian award. No Bal Thackeray protested. Remember that it was Indira Gandhi, as Opposition leader, who spoke up for Bhutto. When Zia visited Delhi in 1983 to attend the NAM summit, Indira Gandhi gave him short shrift.
We can’t forget easily how almost every student on the campus of JNU had shared the outrage over Bhutto’s execution. His religio-fascist tormentor didn’t kill just the leader, he snuffed out the secular idealism of Pakistan’s founder.
The day Bhutto was laid low, many JNU students didn’t eat. There was more sorrow than at the passing away of Mao Zedong a year or two earlier. No one was jailed or attacked for mourning a Pakistani leader or celebrating a Chinese one.
There was never one India where Pakistan was concerned and there was never one Pakistan where India was concerned. There were always mixed opinions about each other and a range of interlocutors on either side. There were Indians who felt close to Zia’s worldview.
There were Indians who felt compassion for Bhutto, not the least because he was the hero, rightly or wrongly, of Pakistan’s liberal Left. Zia sought to crush Bhutto’s followers, but he ended up inviting a rush of camaraderie with the intellectuals from millions of Indian idealists.
Indira Gandhi came back to power in 1980 and she opened the doors to many fugitives from Zia’s tyranny. One of them was a woman, the poet Fahmida Riaz. She was to later lament how India under the political sadhus had acquired likeness with Zia’s Pakistan. The other Pakistani fugitive I remember was a fine journalist, Salamat Ali. There were no police tailing them.
In expressing solidarity with India, Fahmida Riaz was carrying on a tradition that was set in motion in 1947. Pakistan fell on dark times soon under Ayub Khan’s military rule. His objective and Hindutva’s perennial thrust in India were iden- tical. They were both anti-communist. Indian writers led a chorus of protests against Ayub Khan’s regime. Majrooh Sultanpuri’s famous ghazal — Jala ke mishal e jaa’n hum junoo’n sifaat chaley
— was composed in solidarity with his comrades in Pakistan.
The Left-Right polarisation in India à la Pakistan has taken its own time to evolve. Communist bashing is just about beginning, but its roots are old. Divisions within the Indian Left led to one side backing the potential Right, which was to become their undoing.
In the 1970s, visitors to JNU would meet the students in L3, a spacious room wedged between the library and the VC’s office. When Mr Vajpayee became India’s foreign minister in 1977, he was warmly received in L3 by JNU’s leftists. The campus had played a useful role in the defeat of Indira Gandhi and Mr Vajpayee was JNU’s ally. And though the leftist campus welcomed him, it had to suspend its awareness that the guest belonged to the RSS stable, which is where he was destined to return, and he did.
An English daily on Monday carried a sharp critique of India’s Left Front, which it said had been bullied into buying the nationalist discourse of the ruling Right-wing alliance. Student clusters were unhappy that though communist leaders protested the Hindutva attack on JNU, they adlibbed the spurious chorus against alleged anti-nationalist sloganeering.
If India’s communists feel their embracing of the nationalist worldview would fetch them victory in West Bengal or Kerala in the coming polls they may or may not be proved right. What is certain though is that it won’t stop a Hindutva state from hunting down the comrades as the Pakistani state across the border did years ago. JNU must dig in its heels for the long battle ahead, with or without an ideological vanguard.