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Sons Of The Soil: Unravelling
The Idea Of India

By Dilip D'souza

Times Of India
27 November, 2003

Patrick Harker, dean of Wharton Business School , told The Times of India recently that he finds in India an “incredible sense of optimism and self-confidence”.

It’s a “very exciting” time, he said, because of the “feel-good” factor he senses here. But I wonder if dean Harker, or anyone, asked some other Indians how they feel about the economy, or anything. Indians, for example, whose family and friends have perished in Assam recently. It’s our various sons of the soil, of course, hard at work soiling their hands. In Mumbai, they not only stop a railway recruitment exam, they even vandalise a railway office.

In Assam , they prevent Biharis from taking a railway recruitment exam. In Bihar , they “retaliate” by beating up Assamese students in trains. Back in Assam again, they “retaliate” for this “retaliation” by killing Biharis: 50 and counting as I write.

What’s left that’s Indian? In nearly 60 years, the spirit of Indianness we have found the strongest expression for is hostility towards other Indians. We become sons of some map-drawn tracts of soil when it suits us, sons who seem to have been brought up only to assault other sons.

Yet this Indian soil has nurtured each of us, made us all what we are. Indian soil, I want to emphasise. The perversity only starts there. In Assam , some sons of that soil call themselves ULFA; in Maharashtra , other sons of this soil call themselves the Shiv Sena. Both speak the identical language of “outsiders” taking away jobs that “rightfully” belong to “locals”. But ULFA is a “banned outfit”, regularly called anti-national. The Shiv Sena, we are told, is filled with fervent patriots. So fervent that they are an important part of the coalition that runs the country today: A feel-good thought if there ever was one.

In Maharashtra , the Congress chief minister and his NCP deputy also speak the same language. Actually, politicians in every state find it politically lucrative to do so. Sometimes they even do it outside their states. In 1994, the Sena’s Bal Thackeray went to Goa and urged audiences to “keep non-Goans out of Goa ” by implementing a permit system. The irony of this advice coming from a non-Goan seems to have escaped both Mr Thackeray and his listeners. Where is this logic, if it is logic, going to leave us? Will we pursue it even if it means more lives lost? Will we hold to it until it breaks us? What happened to those constitutional guarantees that any Indian can settle and work anywhere in India ?

The Constitution urged us to turn ourselves into an educated whole by instituting primary education for all, and that by 1960. Has that urging translated into reality? The Constitution guarantees justice to every Indian, unqualified by caste, wealth or religion. Would the victims of Delhi 1984, Bombay 1992-93, or Gujarat 2002, picking just three great Indian tragedies, agree that that promise has been fulfilled?

The truth is, the madness we’ve seen in Assam , Bihar and Maharashtra of late is hardly a matter the Constitution can solve. So what if Article 19 gives us the freedom to move anywhere in our country? More persuasive by far is the logic a son of the soil mouths. Logic like that, a son like that, has contempt for a document written half a century ago. Indeed: The theory of sons of the soil is pernicious, wrong, foolish and several other adjectives I could come up with. But not because it violates the spirit of a solemn public document. It is so because it destroys us: You, me, Assamese, Biharis, Maharashtrians. Indians. Sons of the soil. Humans. I mean more than 50 Indian corpses across Assam , this thing called “retaliation”. With their recent cycle of retaliation, Bihar and Assam have lived once more through the mayhem that is the only thing sons of the soil ever produce.

Tamil Nadu and Karna-taka have seen some of the same, instigated by the dispute over the Cauvery. How long before Maharashtrians are beaten up in the north, in “retaliation” for what their brothers of the soil did in Mumbai? Does all this qualify as protecting the interests of sons of the soil?

There is no fault line among us Indians that we are not avidly exploring today. Maybe we must, maybe every nation has to endure such exploration as it matures; I don’t know. I do know that I am now afraid it will tear us apart before it wears itself out. In a real sense, the fissures put fear in me every day. I am frightened, as a non-Assamese, to enter Assam . (As frightened, I’m sure, as an Assamese must feel to enter Bihar , or a Bihari must feel as he travels to Mumbai to take exams.) Frightened to speak my mother-tongue, Tamil, in Bangalore . Frightened to speak Hindi in Gujarat , where a friend and I, college kids at the time, were once man- handled for doing so.

The hatred that builds on either side of all those fault lines, that arcs too often across the lines, can have only one result: Murder. Bear witness, Delhi . Bear witness, Gujarat . Bihar . Mumbai. Assam . Bear witness to this beast that is leaving a nation, even the idea of a nation, in tatters.