Our country is burning
S. Mitra Kalita -
Thursday, October 30, 2008 2:38 PM
I have made these calls before.
"Dharani Khura," I'll address my most all-knowing (read nosy) uncle. "Sap thikey aseh?"
Is everything okay?
A few weeks ago, they asked the same of me when Delhi burned--a series of calculated bombings across our city. Today, it was my turn, mostly to curse the phone when all the lines jammed, then try to track down all the land lines for aunts, uncles and cousins who live scattered among all 18 corners of the death trap created by militants in Assam.I tried to remember who works where - is Montu in District Court or High Court (it was latter)? What about Manju? (Sadly, it was former and she got some shrapnel in her foot and was profusely bleeding--but okay.) Is Dr Sharma Uncle still in Bongaigaon refinery or did he retire? Did Bhanu Pehi make it to school before they struck in Ganesh Guri--yet again? (She did and is in lockdown at the school conveniently on the same hill as the Kamakhya Temple so at least she can pray.) Did Nilakshi make it back to Chennai? (Yes, but the blast in Borpeta Road was right in front of her father's hotel and her cousin got some glass in his face.)
I recount this to friends inquiring and one e-mails me saying, "Geez, too close for comfort."
But hasn't it become for all of us?
As I write this, 58 people are dead, hundreds injured. The death count will surely go higher. Here, in my metro and yours, we might express horror and feel some solidarity for the Assamese are simply entering the state of lawlessness that has marked so many parts of this country over the last year: Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Delhi, Orissa. But in Assam, the peace was shattered long ago, the Assam Accord a frail veil to cover all that really remained broken. Thanks for the IIT-Guwahati, but when oh when will industry and mass employment arrive?
We own a home about 5km from one of the blast sites. Its caretaker is a Bangladeshi rickshaw puller. No sooner was there the breaking news bulletin this morning than an adamant L.K. Advani linking the attacks to a Bangladeshi network. "Let Rahim stay inside tonight," I instruct my uncle. "Same for didi."
I call my father, staying with me in Delhi, to make sure he's heard. He's glued to another battle--Obama versus McCain--on CNN International. "Turn it on the local news," I said.
We enter that state where home becomes fluid once again: he, the Indian citizen, more concerned with his American dream represented by stocks and elections; and me, obsessed with the place he left and the downtrodden relatives who will never venture far enough to see his house, let alone mine in New Delhi. Why does this matter? It represents much of what this fight has been all about, doesn't it: Whose country is this? Who has the right to enter India? To share in its prosperity? Just who is an Indian? Who is an Assamese?
We carried signs, my father and I, when Indira Gandhi came to visit Ronald Reagan, in the summer of 1982. "We'll give you blood but not our oil" and "Assam's resources should stay in Assam." The bus ride down from New York to Washington is one of my earliest memories. A few years later, I learned slogans from my cousins and shouted that Indira Gandhi was nothing but a good old crazy goat (pagoli sagoli--it rhymes and kinda makes sense in Assamese, really) when the CRPF marched down and around and around my grandparents' homes.
Over the last few years, I have been invited back to Assam to speak many times--on investment, on opportunities, on soft skills, on living overseas, on living in Delhi. I am garlanded, celebrated, asked for solutions. I have none. But every few years, just when it looks like we can put this all behind us and create a great state, one with a blueprint that rivals Kerala in tourism and Gujarat in industry, "they" strike. And in some ways, I feel as helpless as that girl picketing outside the White House. I don't know who the enemy is.
"What do they want?" my father will tell me tonight. "It is politics and greed and money. There is no ideology anymore."
Back then, when he was a curly-moustachioed man interviewed by the local news about just why he didn't like Mrs GAN-dhi, as they called her, he believed in his homeland. Then the same people who said they'd fix the problem ended up becoming the biggest crooks of all. Now, I can see his generation giving up. My uncles say they never will see a prosperous Assam; for my late grandmother, the most prosperity she ever enjoyed came, ironically, under the British. I tell my relatives that if Assam fails, India has failed--to create employment, to hold together a diverse people, to foster development and entrepreneurship, to be the answer, not the victim.
Their answer is for everyone to leave. "Go get educated outside, in Bangalore, in Nagpur, in Kolkata," they say to my cousins. "Get jobs at TCS and Infosys and Reliance and Bharti."
I don't disagree. I can't disagree. After all, I don't live there. And I suppose I realize, really, that is is much easier to believe in a cause, in a dream ... from afar.