--Dipankar Bhattacharya
A train journey to Guwahati in a non-AC coach is always a memorable experience. The trains generally run inordinately late and come to sudden stops. They are of course as a rule overcrowded and at times almost whole trains seem to be occupied by men from the security forces with their enormous black trunks and huge suitcases. And as the journey enters its last leg – the stretch from Katihar in East Bihar through New Jalpaiguri in North Bengal to Nalbari in Assam – the train almost magically turns into a mobile supermarket. Endless streams of vendors descend from nowhere to bombard the passengers with their wonderfully weird wares ranging from nailclippers, tummy trimmers and track suits to cordless phones, cassette-players and pirated CDs.
The atmosphere was not very dissimilar during my recent journey. Except that most of the time it was unusually silent with all my fellow passengers preferring to remain either asleep or absorbed in reading or simply ‘corridor shopping’. Among my co-passengers, there was this lively young student from Manipur who having finished his post-graduation in Chandigarh was returning home with bag and baggage, complete with a TV set. Perhaps determined to break the silence, he broke into a conversation with me. Little did we realise that the courteous exchange of pleasantries would grow into an animated conversation that would accompany us for the rest of the journey.
It was quitre a surprise for our young friend from manipur to discover that I was into politics. “But you look like a philosopher,” he exclaimed. I thanked him for the compliment and told him that not all politicians should look and behave like criminals and scamsters. For his benefit, I also stressed the basic difference between pro-people communist activists fighting for a new society and power-hungry bourgeois politicians busy defending the status quo at all costs.
The conversation soon attracted more participants. It turned out that the middle-aged person sitting in front of me was an army official from Uttar Pradesh. He obviously took great pride in belonging to the army – “the only apolitical and truly secular and all-India institution,” as he put it. A brief exchange ensued between him and the student from Manipur on the insurgency situation in the North East.
“Most of the insurgent outfits are busy extorting and accumulating money,” the army official pointed out. Our Manipuri friend nodded in silent approval. From insurgency in the North-East, the army official quickly shifted his gaze to Kashmir. “The insurgents in the North-East at least have some ethical values, they don’t rape women or kill chidren, but the Kashmiri militants have no such qualms,” he added. At this point I intervened against this loaded ‘civilisational’ generalisation, and told him that both in the North-East and in Kashmir, there were outfits and outfits and they differed in their objective and conduct. “In fact, there are many more cases of custodial rape than rape by militants in Kashmir,” I pointed out.
The proud army man was perhaps not prepared for this audacious shift in our conversation. “What do you expect the army to do, preach like priests?”, he retorted with an obvious note of anger and sarcasm in his voice. “Compared to the terrorists, the army’s record is much better,” he went on to claim.
“You are demeaning the army by comparing this great secular institution with small-time insurgent outfits – if you compare the army with terrorists then we will have no other option but to treat the army as another terrorist outfit,” I told him rather bluntly.
This however only provoked him to indulge in a more telling comparison: “The Indian army is behaving with absolutely commendable restraint in Kashmir. If we start behaving even remotely like what the US army is doing in Iraq, you people will raise such a hullabaloo.”
I had to point out again the inherent incongruity in his comparison: “The US still does not claim Iraq to be an integral part of its territory. The Americans are a declared occupation force there whereas India considers Kashmir to be a part of her own and you cannot surely behave like a colonial or imperialist occupation force vis-à-vis your own people, can you?”
Encouraged by all this talk of America and Iraq, a co-passenger, who I later suspected was probably slightly inebriated, asked our army official for his comparative assessment of Bush, Blair and Vajpayee.
“I’m all for Bush,” pat came his reply. “He is really bold and never suffers from indecision, Blair is just a stooge and with due regard for Vajpayee, he has had his time,” he gave us his rationale. “I admire and respect Bush for his belligerence, you have to be belligerent to survive and move forward,” he had now become virtually unstoppable in his paean of praise for Bush.
“I suspect you do not support belligerence as such, but only belligerence of the winner,” I tried to point out. “What do you mean?” our friend clearly did not like being stopped in the middle of his ode to Bush. “Belligerence doesn’t always win, and it can provoke different shades of counter-belligerence, but you call it terrorism,” I explained.
Peeved by this verbal counter-belligerence, the proud official from the Indian Army changed tack. “Of course, in the case of America, it’s not just belliegerence, but also money-power. They have the kind of money to back their belligerence,” he tried to explain.
I tried in vain to correct his notion that Bush’s belligerence was backed by Washington’s own money. “The insurgents and terrorists also need money, and they have their own ways of collecting it, but you call it extortion and drug-trafficking – if money is the God then why discriminate among different religions that worship the same God? Isn’t it all right to beg, borrow, steal or explore any other option to secure money?” I asked with feigned innocence.
This seemed to work, and like one of those Gurus offering free advice on ‘devotional’ channels on your TV set, he now started extolling the virtues of hard work: “It takes hard work to gain money, once we Indians shed our laziness and take to hard work, we can also be rich like the Americans.” I couldn’t resist the temptation to quip: “But the people who work the hardest hardly get enough money to make both ends meet. The agricultural labourers and unorganised workers who constitute the overwhelming majority of our people, they get neither enough work nor minimum wages.”
“You communists are incorrigible, you will always talk like this,” the advocate of belligerence, money-power and disciplined hard work now tried to snub me with the ‘ultimate argument’! Our inebriated friend who had earlier asked for comparative comments about Bush, Blair and Vajpayee was however quick enough with his ‘intereventionist’ reflex: “You said you army people are thoroughly apolitical, what’s your problem then with the communists?”
Belligerence was now writ large on the face of our Army official. Luckily the train had just started entering the Guwahati station. The Manipuri student was courteous enough to thank me for this enjoyable conversation. I redirected the credit to where it was due most, our impeccable friend from the Army.
On the platforms of Guwahati station it was business as usual with gun-toting commandos greeting you at every step. I looked at my watch – the train had not really been that late. And that’s when I also realised that yet another 11 September would be over in a few hours.