Beef fry & southern air

My acute winter wheeze has little to do with Pakistan’s 1971 military operation in Dhaka, but I do believe that both problems originated in north Indian barbarism. Now that I am safely ensconced in a British-built hill station in Kerala, happily located thousands of miles away from the noxious fumes of Delhi in the north, I can more clearly see the role of the north-south divide in our unquiet destiny.

Today’s Afghan problem may have become a world event, but its foundations lie in the northern India of 489 years ago. The unequal contest in the First Battle of Panipat, off Delhi, was staged between Mughal adventurer Babar, read the Northern Alliance, and Ibrahim Lodhi, read Pakhtun forces. Babar’s introduction of cannons on an army of capar-isoned elephants may have fetched him the throne of Delhi, but Kandahar and Kabul continue to challenge his legacy.

The Partition of India, which is also remembered as the day of Independence of our nations from colonial rule was sown and harvested in the north.   The assault on Kashmir started with the Mughals, or earlier. The abuse was extended, initially for loose change, between the British, the Sikhs and the Dogras. Now the northern elite ruling both sides of the border and armed with weaponry, which they pretend was not bought with money stolen from the hospitals and schools of their children, torment Kashmiris with a strange, unrequited love.

They both claim to like their quarries, often with legal citations, and have jointly turned a land of amazing beauty into a Himalayan apocalypse. The north Indian beast has stretched its tentacles into Balochistan in the west and Manipur in the east, destroying, pillaging with slogans of virile nationhood.

While caste has been used as a weapon to subjugate a majority of Indians for centuries, two relatively modern components can be discerned in barbarism as practised in the north today. There is the military power of course. But an equally diabolical assault is led by home-grown carpetbaggers, sometimes in collusion with foreign expertise honed in enormous experience. They have stolen water from the poor and are preparing to plunder their land, militarily, with state-of-the-art gunships and drones. Do we care that just three words could end what passes for Maoist insurgency in Chhattisgarh? End the business (bania)-contractor-politician nexus.

I have blamed Partition as an aspect of northern barbarism, an inability to live with fellow human beings. But we must not exclude those northerners too from our cross hairs who opposed Partition. Maulana Maudoodi didn’t lift a finger for Pakistan but usurped the levers of society, not unlike Hindutva supporters who are subverting India’s secular promise.  

Maulana Masud Azhar offers a sample of this classical northern sickness, blood-curdling in its demeanour, hampered by poor social skills, betraying an acute inability to appreciate good humour and good human beings, particularly if they happen to be women. The Hindu activist who targets “jeansclad girls” for socialising at nightclubs is a close cousin of Masud Azhar.  

On my way to breathe the clean air of Kerala, I spent a few hours in Pavithran’s taxi. The cabbie is an international grade chess master who has also led his state in football and tennis. He has a son who is doing brilliantly in his studies, and hoping to join the Indian Test team as a wicket-keeper batsman.

A daughter is feverishly engaged with higher studies in chemistry, while the wife is a beautician. Pavithran has experimented with systems of belief. He has snatched a passing shot in a movie with his big hero Mamoothy. As a Hindu he has indulged in the occult practices of the Ananda Marg. When he became a vegetarian though his wife threw him out. It was late and we stopped at a wayside restaurant and asked for fish, which was not on offer. So we shared a plate of Kerala’s traditional beef fry with Malabari parathas. As we picked off the last calm, non-controversial, non-consequential morsel we thought of Mohammed Akhlaque, a north Indian victim of north Indian barbarism.