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Varsha Bhosle

Papa, don't preach...

There's no getting around it: Grappling in the dirt is infectious. I, of course, always did it. But now our resident angel, too, has shucked his halo and jumped right into the mortal Arena. We-ll! I'm so relieved. Now I can carry on with my muddying...

In the hope that 1998 brings more understanding between reader and readee, for this year-end piece, I'll talk about myself. To wit: No censure can induce me to change my scandalous idiom - I'm a lady only in a forum of gentlemen. I ain't much different from the rest, duh - which is why I don't sit on a pedestal and ignore your mail. A webzine is *not* a newspaper substitute - to exploit its novelties is called "moving with the times." "Conciliatory" is a synonym for "appeasing" - neither exists in my book. "This is a different league" means, arguments need to be supported here -- demolished logic can't be propped up by picking on spellings (a Usenet ruse). Emotion and Passion turn the mediocre into mavericks -- if I do have these qualities, I'll hang on to them, thank you.

I'm a simple gal, really. Bellicose and vitriolic - yes; sanctimonious and smug - no. For instance, I wouldn't even dream of propounding an "Unconventional Wisdom." Me, wise? Naah. Such a position can only be taken by one who knows he's the sole voice of reason, the last bastion against Hindutva's charge...

I'd never mope over people who can't wrap their puny brains around the idea that if the 19th century European Marxism is a valid ideology for India, Hindutva -- stemming from Raja Shivaji's Hindvi Swarajya, endorsed by Samartha Ramdas, and advanced by Veer Savarkar -- can't possibly be an alien philosophy. I wouldn't know how to moan and groan. I'd just get mad and say: What else can be expected from specimens steeped in the tradition of the trash who betrayed Indian freedom-fighters to the British during the Quit India Movement; who chanted 'China's chairman is our chairman' in the turbulent 60s; and who are still loath to describe China as the aggressor in the 1962 war... It's enough to make you gag. But that's *their* ethos.

Being non-confrontational isn't like me, either...

Off the top of his thick head, Dilip D'Souza names 12 journalists: Lo and behold -- the Hindutva Pantheon... one dead, one with no paper column, one with only one, one editor, one even I've never heard of, one -- not, most free wolves, and all reviled by dunderheaded pinkos (a tautology, I know).

Achtung, baby, Bhosle's list of psecs/pinkos is also taken off the top of her (pretty) head, devoid of purely vernacular writers, and comprising those she sees in Bombay (well, as much as my pal can spot Delhi's Shourie, Dasgupta and Kulkarni here). Since I couldn't let my article turn into a catalogue of Hindutva-bashing dailies, pinko newsmen, commie editors, rabidly secular journals, the CPI's mouth-pieces in over 14 languages and their jholi-toting writer-activists, I stayed with those who can slant and spike - nationally or influentially. Bleats that it is a "level field," come from those who fear it actually being made so... Come now, Dilip, from where you stand, of course you see a "level" field! To render your own argument, don't you guys say that the Hindus against reservations are necessarily the elite - for it's they who fear their supremacy slipping away...?

Hmm... I may have a bead on the real problem: Three from the Hindutva Pantheon so utterly castrate Red swagger that the handful must seem like an army! Also, with at least three being former leftists, it's not difficult to grasp the pinkos' fear psychosis. Call it panic - as in, "We must take note of the fact that the BJP is growing and may turn out to be a threat to us in the near future" (Buddhadev Bhattacharya, Bengal's home minister). Told you, the stage had been set...

I did scratch my head over what had evoked the injured pose and prose... A line about the pinko-overrun press? Or could it be that I touched a raw nerve vis-a-vis the culpability of Comrade Jyoti Basu...? Really, it's so much better to proclaim one's leanings. That way, one needn't defend pawns when all one really wants is to save the commissar. See, the Pantheon's agenda is no state secret -- we're out to expose the "secularist forces". It's when opinion- makers conceal facts and proselytise in the garb of neutrality that the imbalance occurs. Simply say, 'I'm canvassing for the Left' and be done with it! In any case, election-time press crusades are a foregone conclusion (watch out for my specials).

Now let me paraphrase a paragraph from your detached approach (readers, please note: only the Pantheon uses rhetoric and does draame-baazi): Yes, the "Hindutvawadis." Using that word is a never-fail, optimal-use tactic. Brand whoever disagrees with you a "Hindutvawadi" and your job is done. That explains everything. Go ahead and fling in words like "Third Hindu Reich" and "communalist, divisive, fundamentalist forces," too: that only helps the cause and makes it even less necessary to find cogent arguments. That's why a letter in response to one of my columns here graciously encouraged "the likes of Bhosle" to...

Oh but I can't remember the exact words of that goddamn psec. I, too, should have saved and nurtured in my bosom the hate-mail to use months later.

Ah, the gladiators of Arena! You snivel, "And all this rhetoric gets fervent, fawning response from parts of the audience..." Is this the crux?! Was all that whining just a resentment over the VB Fan Club? But since you obviously monitor my mail, didn't you see the letters exhorting the editor to take me off the site, calling me a Sena lackey, a likely murderer, a Parivari thug, etc? Where is your view of a "level field" now...?

Dilip dear, like all so-called idealists, you live in La-la-land: It isn't quite easy to convince people to reject Hindutva. Especially not if you go on like a stuck record over Bal Thackeray -- while playing Helen Keller with "Basuda". Can you renounce *your* political religion? Being committed is not a prerogative of pinkos, you know.

And why wring hands over letter-writers not rebutting the questions raised in your column? After all, in your entire article, there wasn't a single statement that did not rest on your own paranoia about Hindut... oops, "Hindutva". Those inverted commas don't constitute a rebuttal, either. Of course, if you'd slapped on me a Pantheon bigger and weightier than my psec-pinko list (17 names, 14 editors), then it was another matter.

And there's another bit I don't follow. You seem to have African ants in your pants over pinkos being called anti-Hindu; you suggest that they aren't. But doesn't Marxism mandate an abjuration of any religion/philosophy except Communism? Didn't the Soviets destroy churches, synagogues and mosques and send the stubbornly devout to gulags? Then, is there any reason for Hindus to believe that the Indian variety, if empowered, will be any less malevolent? If one's support of the BJP automatically makes one a militant/Nazi/com-div fundie, then why is a ghulaam of the gulag ideology not an anti-Hindu?

For the record, I must say that I strongly condemn the letter- writer who implied that your Christianity pointed to your Hindu- phobia. A stupid, stupid thing to say when quotes from your articles would have sufficed. All that self-righteous twaddle about the human rights of Muslims, coupled with the strange myopia towards the ethnic-cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits, indicates that the right answer was reached through a faulty deduction. I can't think of a sleazier thing to do than capitalise on the plight of Kashmir's dispossessed Hindus in order to push one's personal agenda.

However, perhaps that writer needn't be condemned too strongly. Sometimes, people just presume, but afterwards, the premises fall into place: I wasn't surprised when CNN's Hindu-bashing Anita Pratap turned out to be a Christian. Or when I discovered that the Nandys, Pritish and Ashish, are Serampore Christians. I put the peculiarity down to the fatal combination of minorityism and communism. For, people like Julio Ribeiro, Ronald Mendonca, P C Alexander, Salman Haider, Dr A P J Abdul Kalam and a host of such stalwarts are free of communal malice and are Indians above all else. Yes, they fit well into the "Hindutva" scheme, naturally.

Actually, I'd have let your invective pass if not for the above point. You wrote, Hindutva "makes a fetish of being one country, that everyone who lives in India must feel Indian above all else. But offer the slightest argument to its claims, the smallest disagreement with its notions: then suddenly you're not to be considered Indian, above all, any more."

Ah-ha! Now we're finally getting somewhere. Dilip dear, pray tell, WHAT is the alternative? We shouldn't be one country...? We shouldn't feel Indian above all else...? What exactly do *you* feel? Chinese? Cuban? American? During Partition, missionaries had asked for a separate "Christianstan" consisting of Chhota Nagpur and Travancore... Are you preaching a similar sedition and/or secession here?

Forget Hindutvawadis, ask the average British, American, Japanese... anybody really, what *they* would call adherents of this peerless political doctrine. You see, in the US, it isn't PC to use the word 'nationalism,' but their sovereign overview is no less conservative than it was during the days of Jefferson or Lincoln. They won't say 'traitor' or 'turncoat' or 'Judas'. They'll think 'scum-bag' - and then have the FBI trail you. Secession and sedition are punishable offenses in the US. So, it's not the Indian expat who's "too dense to understand what the USA is all about," it's you who need to have your mental facilities overhauled.

When China invaded India, Comrade Jyoti Basu would simply not admit to it. At a public rally, he said, "If the country has been attacked, how is it that this by-election is being held?" And it was Lal Bahadur Shastri, then Home Minister, who retorted: "How an Indian could make such a statement, I can't even imagine." Basu's grounds are your grounds, and Shastri's are mine. I feel a shudder of fear for the future of our heritage when India has citizens like you. And if that's a stance from my "cornucopia of dramatic poses," what can I say, such burlesques of loyalty bring out the worst in me.

Varsha Bhosle