MARCH 10 Understanding India

MARCH 10 Understanding India 1993 has been a year of meetings for me. During this period I have travelled extensively throughout the country in order to attend a number of conferences and seminars and in the process have met people from a broad cross-section of society. Most of the people I met seemed to have lost their optimism about the way this country is going to develop. But I differ from them. I am still full of hope for India’s future. It is my firm belief that despair runs counter to nature’s overall system and that like any other kind of negativism it is unworthy of serious consideration. Have we forgotten, perhaps, that even the blackest of nights is followed by the sunrise? This sequence of events is so totally and perfectly predictable that an astronomer can tell with confidence the exact moment the sun will rise one thousand years from today. In a world, therefore, in which day will quite unfailingly follow night every twenty four hours ad infinitum, how is it possible that the darkness of despair will not be dispelled by the light of hope? Here is an illustration of this point. On December 6, 1992, when the Babri Mosque was demolished, many newspapers made the assertion that this would turn out to be only the first of a long series of such incidents, anything from 300 to 3,000 mosques having been targetted by extremists for demolition. But my interpretation of the situation was quite the reverse. I said that no other mosque was going to be demolished, for what we had witnessed was not the beginning of anti-masjid politics but the end. This may appear strange today, but both communities very soon gave their tacit approval to the idea that Muslims should forget about their one mosque and Hindus should forget about the many mosques that, in the heat of the moment, they felt should be demolished. Though there is still some talk, on both sides, in the former antagonistic vein, passions are definitely cooling over what is, after all, an anachronism, which cannot continue indefinitely. What underlay my own personal conviction about how this situation would develop was substantial historical evidence that destruction having run its course, must ultimately abate and come to an end. The entire history of mankind abounds in such instances.