Nepal: A rationality reader

Recent events in Nepal have brought into focus a number of contradictions. There has been little analysis of the deeper and real issues in the Indian media which have found that kingdom guilty of many unpleasant things. But are things any better in India, asks noted journalist P. SAINATH.

EVEN as the Indian media mull over why the Nepalese could be so annoyed at us - we being such nice guys - they follows fail-safe methods in annoying them. Sure, what has happened in Nepal is bad. The chain of events has sharpened a number of contradictions in that society: the hills versus plains people problem, anti- Indian feeling among some Nepalese and a poor showing by an ineffective Government to begin with. Not just this period, but the last decade too, shows the ebb of the pro-democracy movement's gains in that country. And ultra-left and far right seem to be ganging up, in fact, helping create that hopelessness where many will welcome strongman rule once again over democracy

There has been little analysis of the deeper and real issues in the India media. But no hesitation in finding Nepal as a whole guilty of lots of unpleasant things. What if we applied to our own society even a tenth - a sensible tenth - of the standards by which we have judged the Nepalese? The results would be interesting. From what sort of platform do the media here apply their moral loftiness? The planks are many. Let us look at just four.

Why are they so irrational?: Those poor people dying in meaningless riots. Our injured innocence is a bit misplaced. The irrationality of the rioters in Kathmandu was very real. So was the damage and loss of life that it led to. It still in no way surpasses the many wonderful things we do here - only we do them more often.

Irrational? After M.F. Husain has paid a thousand times for his supposed sins against the gods, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP)- Bajrang Dal still attacks his film in Ahmedabad, smashes theatres and intimidates audiences. It then proudly proclaims its "defence of Indian culture" and says it will persist no matter what apologies Husain may tender for crimes he has never committed.

I could not spot any editorial in the papers that focussed mainly on the irrationality of the VHP's attack on the film. Those that mentioned it editorially at all took care to distance the whole thing from the Vajpayees, Advanis and Murali Manohar Joshis - all very rational people. The last is a professor of physics who believes there were flying chariots and nuclear weapons in the time of Lord Ram. (In more honest societies, he would simply be termed crazy. In our highly rational environment, he becomes Minister for Education).

The editorials that dealt with Vajpayee's recent rush of temple blood did so mostly from the point of view of examining tactics and strategy. Not in terms of the madness the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has time and again publicly put forward and defended on Ayodhya. The loss of five lives in Kathmandu was a major tragedy and the circumstances quite unprecedented in Nepal. Advani's rath yatra in this country claimed many more hundreds of lives in its insane trail. It is perfectly rational that he continues as Minister whose special duty it is to safeguard citizens, the nation and uphold the law.

Oh no! The controversy involving the Prime Minister's "calculated" outburst was all a matter of image. No irrationality, please. We are Indians.

Vicious outbursts by the Thackerays and Singhals too have led to far more loss of life than anything that ever happened in Nepal. There was just one time in recent memory that a Government in Maharashtra tried to make Thackeray accountable for his irrationality. The press was largely critical of that move. So he goes on with it. Disenfranchise the Muslims. Send them back to Pakistan. But that is only politics. What's with these Nepalese, anyway?

Nepal as a den of the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI): The "den" image has cropped up in countless reports since the hijacking of the Indian Airlines plane in late 1999. Remember how the media went to town then? I am sure the ISI is active in Nepal. Well, our Government tells us the ISI has not been dormant here either. They have even been active in the Red Fort. And if we go by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) view of things, the ISI is entrenched in every city and town in this country. So if Nepal is their den, what does that make India?

That the Delhi Government is specially gifted in ISI-spotting is beyond dispute. An intelligence agency puts out a note calling Dr. J.K. Jain an ISI agent. If true, this confirms that the ISI has successfully penetrated the National Executive of the ruling BJP. Jain is a former BJP MP, a Sangh media baron and among the most faithful of saffron souls the parivar has ever known.

That the Sangh parivar itself has historically so often served the cause of India's adversaries is indisputable. However, that is another matter altogether. If Jain is indeed guilty of links with the ISI, the Government could have acted against him. If he was innocent, it could have said so plainly and punished those behind the smear job. It did neither. And all, it seems, stems from a petty property dispute the man has had with a BJP minister.

That is frightening. If this is how rationally they deal with their best friends, one of their own pack, imagine what they would be willing to do to their political opponents.

The rise of anti-Indianism: This is true and disturbing. The attacks on Indian businesses in Nepal and anyone looking "Indian" are serious. The little nation has long been known for its tolerance and friendliness. What has occurred is an alarming break with that tradition. It might help, though, to try and understand why it has been happening.

Most readers of newspapers and viewers of television in India would not know much about it. It is not so many years ago that we blocked all transit points but one on our border with Nepal. Delhi then decided to make us look worse by arguing that it had upheld its "international obligations" by keeping open that single transit point. This was not only a technical stand, but also a very stupid one. We were talking about a country with which we claimed to have "deep and friendly relations". If anything, it is surprising the anti-Indianism provoked by that act did not burst into the open then as it did this time over a foolish, possibly planted, story.

The situation on the border changed when the Gujral Government was in power. The transit point blockade was lifted. Things actually improved on that front. Sadly, all that is threatened as we refuse to look at the piling up of anti-Indian grievances in Nepal.

Our water disputes with Kathmandu have hardly been handled with great delicacy. And along the border are dams and other structures that could one day cause mega-deaths on both sides. We built most of them. The Nepalese have protested against these in the past. Our media audience knows nothing about them.

Anti-Indianism is not the only thing floating about the sub- continent. How should we term references to our neighbours in the Sangh's literature? Take what young students could be learning from Uttar Pradesh's textbooks. That Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, for instance, were and should be part of a Greater India. Gujarat, it seems, is eager to catch up in peddling this dirt. The anti-Indian rioters in Nepal's streets have not latched on to that one yet. It is a matter of time before they do, though. Many in Nepal have already drawn much inspiration from the politics of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

And in case there is any chance of their missing the point, there is K. R. Malkani to set that right. He laments India's failure to acquire Nepal when it had a chance to do so, thereby forfeiting prime real estate in the hills. Malkani says out loud what the top bosses of the parivar deeply believe but will not openly admit. Not just yet, anyway. Oh yes, Malkani should not have said what he did. So our media helpfully insulate his party chieftains from the fallout of his words. They have become good at that. Nothing the BJP, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), VHP and Bajrang Dal say or do can ever be blamed on Vajpayee, Advani et al - thanks to the peculiar rationality of our press.

Take the bans on New Year revelry and birthday cakes in Uttar Pradesh. These were indeed attacked as irrational hogwash. But again, what the BJP and ABVP did on the ground was never connected to the Vajpayees and Advanis - those paragons of rationality at the top. What do the BJP and VHP have to do with Vajpayee and Advani anyway? But with Nepal, a whole society can be stereotyped on the actions of a few.

In any case, disowning Malkani, senior BJP man though he might be, was on the cards. The RSS has really got its knickers in a twist over Nepal - remember all the stuff about The Last Hindu Kingdom? The last and only Hindu ruling monarch? The Sangh crowd was always against the pro-democracy movement in that country. At the same time, Nepal is, ah well, Hindu. How do you badmouth it and support it at the same time? It is not easy.

Most Nepalese might still be ignorant of the Sangh parivar's textbooks. But many were angered by the coverage of the IA plane hijack in the mainstream Indian media. Security at Indian airports has hardly been exemplary. And the kind of "we- penetrated-Kathmandu airport-security" stories could also have been done at a dozen terminals in this country. Besides, the stereotyping of Nepal and the Nepalese that was a by-product of the accompanying hysteria did not make us too many friends. That this helped generate anti-Indian feeling goes without saying.

Nepal as Underworld haven: This much repeated charge is not without truth. It might help, though, to point out that a large part of that underworld is, er... Indian. Within that, the mafias of Mumbai and U.P. have a big share. The Chotta Rajans, Dawoods and Babloo Srivastavs have all had bases and links here - as they have had in many Indian cities.

It is clear the unfortunate young actor, Hrithik Roshan, never said the ridiculous things attributed to him. There is more than one way, though, that the false idea that he did could have caught on. One, it was just a nonsensical rumour - not unlikely - that got started off by a seedy newspaper. How many of those do we have here that have begun riots? Surely far more than Nepal.

Two, it could be linked to the shooting of his father, Rakesh Roshan, a few months ago in Mumbai. No one disputes that it was an underworld attack. One that came after Roshan senior apparently refused to succumb to an extortion demand. So the follow-up might possibly have been the planting of a story aimed at tarring his son's image and career. Despite that and the recent police action on the Bollywood-underworld nexus, we have not begun to examine the tip of this iceberg.

The Indian media in the 1990s gave more space to covering Bollywood than ever in their history. Yet, there is a powerful reluctance in the great newspapers of this land to have their reporters look too closely into Bollywood-underworld links. If anything has come out at all, it is because of the Mumbai police or a section amongst them, not because of the media. This is an investigation where the press lag shamefully behind the police.

Nepal does not even come into this picture. The Indian media do. Many in it have no incentive to probe deeply the ties that bind Bollywood to bad money. Such an investigation could prove highly embarrassing. There were worried people in Mumbai's media when the arrest of producer Naseem Rizvi.

And the arrest this week of financier Bharat Shah has set many nerves on edge. Once again the media are just covering police action. Not one independent investigation has come from them. Surely odd, for a media that pride themselves on their knowledge and coverage of Bollywood.

It was comical to watch an External Affairs spokesperson having to address the media each day on what a teenybopper heartthrob from the film world said or did not say. But it could be avoided in the future if the media did less stereotyping and more reporting. Less instigation and more investigation.

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