The new slave dynasty
When Mohammad Ghauri died in 1206, the childless ruler’s favourite slaves nominated one of their own to rule Delhi. Qutubuddin, Iltutmish and Balban were the prominent sultans who forged India’s first slave dynasty.
It ruled for 84 years and left behind fabled monuments in Delhi including the beautifully engraved landmark known as Qutub Minar.
Departing British viceroys bequeathed to India its second slave dynasty though the new rulers claimed to subscribe to liberal notions of representative democracy. While Nehru’s embrace of the British Commonwealth may have secured deeper fawning ties with the mother country, the idea was resented by the more vocal Indians. The new slave dynasts continue to rule from splendorous colonial mansions although they patronise ungainly ‘DDA flats’, government-planned houses in which locating an uncrooked wall could be an achievement.
Majrooh Sultanpuri, known widely for his romantic Urdu-Hindi film lyrics, was also a great rabble-rouser of the 1950s. He penned a poem deriding Nehru’s Anglophile world view and exposing his minions who dressed in coarsely woven khaddar to mask their consumerist penchant. Declaimed Majrooh:
“Khaddar ki kechul ko pahen kar nagin ye lehraane na paae, maar le saathi jaane na paae!
Commonwealth ka daas ye Nehru, aur tabaahi laane na paae, maar le saathi jaane na paae!”
(Liveried in a snake’s moult, beware the khaddar wearing leader. Get him, comrade, before he flees! Beware of Nehru the Commonwealth’s prized slave; let him not wreak any more havoc. Get him, comrade, before he flees!)
Nehru was resolute in his indulgence of India’s British link. He used colonial methods to get even with his critics. When he visited Aligarh Muslim University just before his death, communist activists planned to disrupt his meeting by chanting Majrooh’s by now successful poem against India’s unending love of the British Commonwealth. The government announced prohibitory orders under Section 144 of the criminal procedure code to arrest the sloganeers before the prime minister’s arrival. The piece of law was inherited from 1861, when the British created it to prevent a meeting of more than four Indians in a public place. The idea was to pre-empt a repeat of 1857 when Indian sepoys and civilians colluded to revolt against their colonial masters.
It is hardly strange that the same law — Section 144 CrPC — has been imposed to keep the Delhi districts near the venues of the October Commonwealth Games free of trouble-makers. The Romans built the Coliseum to watch the spectacle of slave-duels. The spectators were themselves enabled democrats. After all they nominated the senators and the senators elected Caesar. There was democracy in Rome too if only for the privileged few that had access to its benefits.
The kasbah or basti of Nizamuddin West surrounds a popular Sufi shrine. It was not directly planned by the Delhi government though its precariously built multi-storied houses, belonging mostly to upwardly mobile Muslim communities — tailors, butchers, barbers, part-time teachers, religious tour operators, IT jobbers — bear the imprint of the city’s DDA mentality. In the direct visual range of the main Games venue, the basti and the open drain that services it will need quick papering over to prevent it from sticking out like a sore thumb.
The busy road facing the shrine connects Delhi to Agra. Its pavements worked as makeshift all-weather beds for the more impoverished citizens of the city. The road divider was home to an army of homeless squatters. Now the municipality has decided to beautify the vicinity since it is right next to the Nehru Stadium, the main arena of the Games. Small saplings being planted by the municipality have uprooted hundreds from the precarious, dirt-stacked perches. Sometimes posses of armed police are required to forcibly evict the more arduous pavement dwellers. A majority of them are Muslim.
Driving towards the north-western trajectory of the Delhi-Agra road, notice the crossroads between Chinmaya Ashram and the imposing India Habitat Centre which serves as a club for Delhi’s yet-to-arrive elite. All the traffic signals on this road are milling with young girls and boys whose parents, mostly poorly paid labourers, have left them there to eke out a living to support their own meagre earnings.
If the children are from the tribal communities of neighbouring Rajasthan they would put up an instant display of skills such as walking the tightrope or doing a backflip to catch the eye of a self-absorbed motorist. Other children are from the Dalit communities. They sell pirated books and steering-wheel covers. In the evenings in good season, their parents sell fragrant jasmine necklaces. Some men and women beg for a living. Small children too — as young as three to five years old — scramble on to cars’ footboards to stick their noses in the windowpanes. They will seek money, bottled water, food, anything that will make them please their mothers who watch from a distance, often nursing an infant. Unicef’s India office, which is mandated to protect them, is located a building away but it is not clear if they are doing anything about the state of affairs.
Little Seema, who I don’t see on the streets nowadays, was so good with the tightrope regime that Nadia Comaneci would be proud of her stillness on the bare string she used to walk on. Looking at the breaking news this week, girls like Seema would be out of the race. In its rush to meet the deadline for pending work the Delhi government, we heard in parliament the other day, has diverted funds earmarked for the development of the Dalit and tribal communities.
Strange, since Dalit and tribal children are nowhere in the frame as far as the Commonwealth Games are concerned. In fact, for the less privileged lot India’s gala event has become a source of daily fear of the police and pervasive insecurity from the municipality. Thousands of beggars have already been deported to far-flung states from where they were said to have arrived.
For Prime Minister Manmohan Singh the Games will be a diversion from the daily mayhem of civilian deaths in Kashmir, Chhatisgarh, Manipur and many other hotspots that have spun out of control across India. People are asking why when the country was growing at a snail’s pace of 2.5 per cent India was more peaceful than now when it is supposed to be galloping at between 8 and 9 per cent.
Dr Singh told his alma mater at Oxford not too long ago that the British gave India the “rule of law” which was the result of its meeting the “dominant empire of the day.” The fact is India did not ‘meet’ the dominant empire of the day. It was conquered and colonised, her economy plundered, and her people as a whole, irrespective of class status, converted for the first time into inferior beings in their own country. The Commonwealth Games is a tribute to that slave mentality.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Mohammed Abbasi 