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ASIF Kidwai was a popular homeopath of Lucknow. But he was equally a raconteur, a wit, a political publicist, a journalist, a moderate, well-read Muslim activist, a flirt, a handsome man with a flowing thick black beard.
His legs were paralysed by a bout of pneumonia confining him to a bed for life. The bed was stacked with books and a notepad. Asif Bhai, as we called him, smelled of mild attar, its bouquet varying with the season, and a fragrant paan, which he occasionally chewed. His archaic bathroom slippers under the bed puzzled me always. The lightly bamboo-curtained boudoir-cum-free-clinic regulated a stream of patients, poets, academics and sighing women. The language shifted from high browed Urdu to lilting Awadhi to Shavian English, in any order.
During the 1965 India-Pakistan war, police surrounded Asif Kidwai’s house amid dark rumours that usually accompany cordoning off of Muslim homes. Asif Bhai would routinely tune into Radio Pakistan for the ‘other side’ of the story and the state momentarily thought he was a spy. BBC Radio had not yet become a household name.
Asif Bhai once treated a young boy for childhood incontinence, a problem whereby the six year-old would wet his bed in sleep and stink up the room for those who shared it. The prescription included a sweet white powder to be taken twice a day for three days. A boiled goose egg at night, twice a week would be helpful. And yes, the last chore of the day: the patient should empty his bladder into a shining brass tumbler and slip it under the elder brother’s bed at night.
Thought the boy was healed, it was only some 20 years later that Asif Bhai gleefully revealed the magic in the cure. All he wanted, he declared with a chuckle, was that the boy should sleep with an empty bladder. The sweet powder and goose eggs were placebos. The brass tumbler was a decoy to lure the patient, to make it exciting and mysterious for his young spirit.
Simple solutions to complex issues formed an essential feature of Indian sagacity, but those days are gone. When a glass of Coke spilled on his sofa at a party, the newly returned Non-Resident Indian reached for his spanking new vacuum cleaner, which he had brought from the Gulf, and began to assemble it. By which time a lady guest had spread out an old newspaper to soak up the mess.
Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khana, Emperor Akbar’s remarkably learned noble, wrote a versified aphorism in Brajbhasha, one of many he is famous for:
“Rahiman dekh bade’in ko, laghu na deejiye daar
Jaha’n kaam aawai sui kaha’n kari talwar
(Often a tiny needle is all we need, not the sword
Your finely stitched robe makes the point my lord)
Consider two issues that have turned gangrenous all because Indian strategists leaned on the sword where a needle and thread would have worked nicely. Take, for example, the Kashmir dispute and the Maoist insurgency in Chhattisgarh. All we needed was a more democratic, more secular and more equitable India, and there would be no issue in either of the locations to warrant dire military solutions.
Anyone who has talked to Kashmiris over the last few decades would know that the source of everyone’s grief in the Valley was India’s fading secular democracy. Kashmiri separatism may have an entire history of aloofness from New Delhi to lean on, but the promise of unbiased and equitable democracy that India once showcased did trump the nascent sectarian urges.
What went wrong then was never hard to divine. First it was the tinkering with the constitutional guarantees, which New Delhi gave Kashmir. Then the rigging of elections to suit New Delhi’s whims and prejudices hugely riled the public in Valley.
In recent years Kashmir has been one of the issues between India and Pakistan when their talks are proceeding smoothly. Hiccups turn it into a flaming core dispute backed by a battery of precariously poised nuclear weapons.
The implicit assertion in this is that Indians would rather plan for a nuclear war than plug the leaks in their secular, equitable democracy, which was promised by the country’s still enviable constitution. Why anyone from Kashmir, no matter how seriously they despised Indian presence in Srinagar, would want to go to an ethnically riven Pakistan is perhaps too simple a question to pose since its logic eludes the big budget policymakers in New Delhi.
Similarly, the Maoist insurgency is rooted in the coveted virgin forests, land, water and mineral resources that India’s tribal people have preserved and worshipped from time immemorial. It follows that the Maoists who assumed the role of guarantors of tribal rights in the absence of the state’s resolve can be easily disarmed without recourse to an eventually unworkable military option.
All that the tribes-people have been asking New Delhi is to heed their one simple request: “Ease out the banya-contractor-politician nexus from the forests.” The nexus has been mercilessly plundering the resources presumably with New Delhi’s patronage while not sparing the tribal women from its snare. If the future doesn’t look too bright for Chhattisgarh it has to be explained by the rise of Narendra Modi as a fact of life, a nominee of the entrenched exploitative troika.
Asif Bhai and Rahim Khan-i-Khana are no more and the world they left behind looks comfortable with its penchant for witless solutions to problems that were not meant to be there.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
