[sacw] [ACT] Clinton's Postcard from India

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch
30 March 2000

[Important Announcement to all: The sacw dispatches will be discontinued
between the period 30 March - 15 April 2000, some exceptional postings will
however continue during this period]
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Clinton's Postcard to Us from India
By Amitava Kumar (Forthcoming in Frontline)

The Indian newspapers lavished a great deal of attention last week
on how
much Bill Clinton had loved the mango ice cream he was served during a
banquet in New Delhi. I learned this, oddly enough, from the New York Times.
As for me, living in Florida, when Peter Jennings broadcast the
first of
his several reports on Clinton's visit to India, I settled down in front of
the television set with curry chicken on my plate.
Jennings focused that night on India's wars with Pakistan over
Kashmir. We
were shown footage of the conflict in Kargil which had claimed more than a
thousand lives last summer.
For a few moments, we saw the glaciers of Siachen where the Indian and
Pakistani armies routinely exchange fire at freezing altitudes.
As the camera picked out the soldiers trudging in the immense, snowy
wastes, it was difficult to know whether they were Indians or Pakistanis.
The slow-moving figures seemed to be dwarfed as much by the Himalayan peaks
as by a meaningless cause that had somehow become so much bigger than them.
In his book Countdown, the writer Amitav Ghosh describes that the
military
effort in Siachen costs India 20 million dollars every day. The cost for
Pakistan, although lower, is also substantial and therefore devastating to
its national economy.
Ghosh writes: "If the money spent on the glacier were to be divided
up and
handed out to the people of India and Pakistan, every household in both
countries would be able to go out and buy a new cooking stove or a bicycle."
At one point during the ABC broadcast, I saw Indian women at a rally
holding a cloth banner whose odd diction caught my eye. It read "We Proud
On Our Nuclear Tests."
I'm often called upon to "explain" Indian reality to my students or
colleagues. But, in that misplaced syntax of the banner--a result of the
transposition of the rules of Hindi grammar onto the words of English--I
saw a way for emblematizing the condition of contemporary Indian politics.
The BJP's ultranationalist ideology has its roots in the non-English
speaking middle-class, in India's small towns and its metropolitan
petty-bourgeois sections. It is in that broad group that the ruling
right-wing party finds its support.
Consequently, in Indian politics, it is the liberal elites and the
downtrodden poor and minorities that are left to give voice to another,
alternative ideology. Thus, we get to witness the Booker Prize-winning
author Arundhati Roy courting arrest alongside the tribal men and women who
will be displaced by the building of the mega-dam on the Narmada river in
central India. This latter group of the aggrieved elite and the terminally
tormented was not party to the dialogues with Clinton during his visit. In
fact, party to Clinton's entourage were executives from the Ogden Energy
group who signed an agreement with S. Kumar's, thereby hurting the campaign
against big dams.
It is entirely possible, however, that given the prejudice of my
own class
and my profession, I might be reading too much into the simple message of
the banner about the bomb. But, in such circumstances, it is difficult to
know when one is reading too much or too little. The signs of culture often
challenge and baffle the critic. For example, in the ethnic Indian press
here in the U.S., I recently came across an Indian beer company which in
its new ad campaign enjoins Indian customers to become serious drinkers
with the slogan: "Vices can get you far. Look where it got Clinton."
Vices or not, Clinton certainly got to go as far as India.
The New York Times, among the numerous photographs it printed of the
American President in the Indian sub-continent, also carried one which
showed Clinton and his daughter, Chelsea, posing in front of the beautiful
Taj Mahal. On seeing that photograph, I was reminded of another, also taken
in front of the Taj, which showed Chelsea smiling for the cameras with her
mother, Hillary Clinton. That picture had been taken during the pair's
visit to India in 1995.
I was then living in an Arab section of New York City. The Oklahoma
City
bombing had taken place only a few days before. The U.S. media had raged
about Arab terrorists. Then they discovered that the bomber was a white
American, Timothy McVeigh, and he looked, as a mediawatch analyst described
it, more like a midwestern frat-boy than like the mujahideen.
One morning, I walked into a store near my apartment to buy bread. The
Yemeni store-owner had put on the wall behind him the photograph he had cut
out of a newspaper. It showed Hillary and Chelsea Clinton seated together
in front of the Taj Mahal in Agra. I asked the Yemeni man why he had pasted
that picture.
He began to answer me and then anger overwhlemed him. He stopped.
He had
started by saying "I wanted to show how proud people feel when they're not
Muslim...." Then, his voice choked with emotion and he fell silent.
What was he trying to tell me? I will never know.
Maybe he was saying that the beauty of the Taj Mahal, which could of
course be described as an example of Islamic architecture, was here being
appreciated by people who, in some indirect way, were responsible for a
million Muslims dead in Iraq.
I cannot say for sure.
But whatever name we give to that emotion, I could see that it was
a pain
mixed with rage that made the store-owner silent.
Maybe it was the fact that the smiling women in the photograph,
sitting in
front of a mausoleum and with a mosque on the side, looked so happy?
And so very different from that pregnant Arab woman who, hiding
alone in
her bathroom, suffered a miscarriage because a mob in a midwestern American
town surrounded and threw stones at her home. All because someone of her
faith had quickly been assumed to be the one who had planted the bomb in
Oklahoma City.
That is the memory to which my mind returned when I saw the picture of
Clinton standing in the sun in front of the marble Taj.
I want to think of this memory as a postcard that the American
President
sent me from his vacation in the country of my birth.

Amitava Kumar is the author of Passport Photos, coming out next month from
the Unviersity of California Press.

_______________________
Amitava Kumar

"...There are new words
being born on the streets of our native cities."
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8388.html