Holi brought colour and music (not always without the admixture of the mildly intoxicating bhang) and allowed Indians in and beyond the Indo-Gangetic plains to transit from harsh winters to harsher summers. —AP Photo

In the early days of the Indian republic, the end of February and beginning of March would usher the humming of Kaafi and Piloo on the radio, in the temples, in parks and auditoriums. For as long as one can remember, the two ragas have been associated with the singing of perennially magical Holi songs, which celebrate the romance of the impish god Krishna and his beautiful consort Radha. Some musical experts would throw in a dash of Raag Tilang to decorate the songs but generally, as a rule, no other melody would be tapped for this very exclusively traditional moment.

It also happens that the federal budget for India’s fiscal year that starts on April 1 has been traditionally unveiled at around this time. But this remained a vestigial factor in public life, as the budget really meant little more than the prices of cigarettes and bidis going up or not going up. The undercurrent of the baniya-corporate subterfuge even then dogged the country, but it went largely unnoticed because people trusted a welfare state and its sentinels in parliament. However, the fact that sacks full of budget documents would be diverted to business tycoons as soon as Part B of the finance minister’s speech was over indicated deeper and potentially sinister implications in the speech than the common man could or would discern.

So Holi brought colour and music (not always without the admixture of the mildly intoxicating bhang) and allowed Indians in and beyond the Indo-Gangetic plains to transit from harsh winters to harsher summers. The budget was left between the government and the then robust trade unions to haggle over. Life was idyllic. The hippies came in droves to savour the Indian dream. Even The Beatles found solace here although their romance would soon give way to disillusionment as was to happen with Indians themselves a bit later.The parliament guarded its rights jealously, and when these were threatened, as indeed they were by Indira Gandhi, for example, in 1975, the people rallied against the highhandedness and they evicted the erring incumbent peacefully, by recourse to the vote. However, between 1977 and 1979, the first time when a non-Congress ruled India, Indians saw that no matter who they voted in their mandate was, subtly initially and brazenly later, cornered by the baniya-corporate class. This was a global slide, not one confined to India’s fabled democracy.

In fact, the Indian people noticed how powerful pretenders of democracy that had relentlessly wrecked democracies across the world, from Iran to Chile, and from Salvador to Pakistan, had suddenly developed a new taste for it, so much so that they were willing to uproot and pillage nations to usher the system, which they had once undermined. Either there had been a change of heart towards it or else there was a radical change in the content of, in the very essence of, democracy?

Eight years ago, on February 28, a most peculiar event occurred in India. A reign of terror was unleashed against helpless men and women of one religious community by a state government that ruled in the name of another religious group. As such there was nothing new about the massacre of Muslims. There was mounting evidence already that the most sacred tenets of India’s otherwise enviable constitution were getting unhinged or corroded. The massacre in Gujarat in February 2002 was not bereft of a previously successful methodology – as in the lynching of 3000 Sikhs, a majority of them being killed in the Indian capital, in 1984. Dalits are attacked and humiliated and the minority Christians are hounded, their churches burnt, their nuns raped.

But the massacre in Gujarat was different. It began in an organised way by hordes encouraged by the BJP government there. And the mayhem began even as the Indian parliament assembled to hear the budget speech (delivered by the BJP finance minister Yashwant Sinha). There is nothing sacred about the day the Indian budget is unveiled. It just has to become effective from April 1, and so it could have been postponed by a few days had any party, including the left so decided. In the morning of February 28, some of us covering Prime Minister Vajpayee’s joint press conference with Afghan President Karzai, sent him a note to discuss the burning alive of Hindus in a train at Godhra separately, without dragging the issue before the visiting guest. Mr Vajpayee returned after seeing off the visitor. He looked worried. He condemned the killing of Hindu passengers in the train and appealed for calm and restraint. It went unheeded. Nobody raised the issue in parliament. Even the numerically small but assertive left remained silent, so riveted were its MPs to the arriving drivel of the finance minister’s proposals.

So it wasn’t surprising at all that news came in last week about the decision by India’s hounded and self-exiled painter M.F. Husain to accept the nationality of Qatar and not a politician was moved to express his or her anger at the shabby treatment he was given. Parliament was meeting for the budget session – (it happens between February and March, remember?) – and the opposition comprising the left and the right of the spectrum had paralysed the proceedings over price-rise. The foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan were meeting in Delhi and they had the huge agenda before them, with implications for unbridled terrorism and nuclear conflict. But so cavalier has our parliament become today that they remained – the left and the right – glued to price-rise not sparing a thought for the Indian whose association they would lose for ever because of their own short-sightedness.There thus seems to be a total paralysis of politics in India today. (Its classic confirmation came when the young Congress scion Rahul Gandhi declared after his party’s victory in 2004 that “the BJP is a joke” and its leaders “insult and abuse my family members”. Fascism a joke and its main fault is that it is abusive?) What happened with Husain is a shame and newspapers have written editorials on the issue. His paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses annoyed rightwing Hindus and they were allowed to vandalise his exhibitions. That is a feature of fascism. But his main difficulties came from the fact that there were countless charges pending against him in courts across India, charges slapped on him by right-wingers adept at using the courts. This is where the Indian constitution appears to have become pointlessly vulnerable to fascism.

It is true that Husain for all the reasons that he should be supported is also an elitist symbol. However, if fascists can hound him out of the country, imagine the havoc they must and do unleash on ordinary citizens – including those who may want to wear jeans or go to a pub with a girl or a boy. Considering that Holi is or at least was about love it is odd that it lends itself to cultural vigilantes. Even worse, their victims do not see a link between their tragedy and the hollowing out of India’s democracy. The depoliticised nation is ripe for many more of its citizens who would envy Husain’s decision to accept a new nationality, no matter how spurious and distasteful the notion of nationality sounds the context of creative arts.

Moreover, an exodus of fascism’s victims can’t be a fair substitute to a good fight that needs to be given to the scourge. There is reason to rescue Holi and its music from a tragically depoliticised milieu. Without robust politics to defend it there is little hope that a culture and a tradition we cherish would last.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com