Tolerant Bigots

In '70 when General Yahya Khan's military regime began its ethnic cleansing in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), 11 million refugees streamed into India. Eleven million Hindus seeking relief from religious persecution. Every year, between August and November, a population equivalent of Kosovo would stroll across a borderless border, set up house on muddy embankments, get jobs on the streets of Calcutta, even move to places as far off as Delhi and Bombay. By the time war broke out between India and Pakistan, a whole Australia had been added to India. An Australia without outbacks, beaches or low interest rates. Earlier, when China annexed Tibet, 120,000 Tibetans moved across the Himalayan passes into India. Their entry into the country was meant to be a temporary reprieve- from political repression. Once Mao and Chou cleared their heads about national boundaries, it would be safe to return. But that wasn't to happen. For some 40 years now they continue to live in their temporary home. Every month, an average of 2,000 Nepalese also cross over into India; they come seeking a better life in a country whose own citizens are seeking a better life....

How many other countries of South Asia can claim such a history of benign allegiance? Throughout history, refugees of antagonistic religious and ethnic backgrounds have been absorbed as quickly and easily as MacDonald's burger in the land of tandoori chicken. For the vast majority of people in South Asia, India is the melting pot- often a simmering cauldron of economic, social and religious strife. But at least it is not an Evil Empire. And you know for sure, it will never strike back.

But what is the price of tolerance and freedom- and indeed generosity- in a poor country?

Come and share my house, its walls and floor. But sorry guys, there's nothing in the fridge. Without getting into Keynesian dialectics, how free are you without economic opportunity, without material choice? Does your understanding of freedom only refer to American ideals? Are you freest when there's enough for everyone in every pot and every garage? Or is freedom also linked to the sensation you feel when you wake up in a south Indian village grateful just to see the sunrise over the palm-edged paddy field, and knowing that your destiny is linked as much to the both of them as to the Muslim family down the street, the Syrian Christian postman delivering your letters, the English daughter-in-law preparing tea in the next room? Is it? Even though you know that every few months this bucolic idyll is bound to be shattered by some discordant newspaper headlines that will appear in the papers: Christian missionary and family burnt in Orissa by fundamentalist mob; Busload of Hindus gunned down in Kashmir; Policemen gang-rape tribal woman.

Sure, these are heinous crimes. But then, in a free society, aren't these incidents merely the testing flash points of excessive tolerance? Aren't a couple of caste-related murders, odd cases of ethnic cleansing, people shot in trains, some rape, far better than 50 years of institutionalised cleansing, murder and rape? In fact, given the close proximities and social overlaps and indeed the daily infringement of one community on the life of another, it is surprising that there are so few incidents. And more people don't kill each other just because someone doesn't like the shape of your nose, or the outline of the building you pray in, or the dot your wife wears on her forehead....

Once, when studying in the US, I returned to India with a female classmate of mine. An occasion to test the tolerance levels of my tolerant family, I had failed to mention in my letter home that my friend was black. A minor oversight, considering most of my own family varied between walnut and bitter chocolate. At home, faced with a portrait of sour relatives, it took my grandmother some time and courage to ask me in Punjabi: 'If you had to bring a foreigner couldn't you find a white one?' My friend Katie, hovering uncertainly in the background caught the gist of her words and smiled benignly. Surely, she must have wondered, how a people so tolerant of religious differences could be so graceless, so racially unkind as to worry about something as trivial as skin shade.

What could I tell her?

That I was an Indian. The product of a Hindu father and a Muslim mother (who converted to Hinduism after marriage). Raised as a Hindu, married to a Kerala Jew; my sister's husband was a Protestant Christian. That on my father's side were a range of Sikh relatives; that when Uncle Latif- my mother's brother- visited Delhi, he used her Hindu prayer-room for his own Muslim prayers. That as kids we received presents for Diwali and Christmas. That when the extended family sat down to eat, except for Buddhism, all major religions were represented at the table. And that my journalist father at the head, like religion's own Kofi Annan, held the group together with his balanced, tolerant- perhaps slightly edited- views.... That beneath the reverential flush and ritual of their religions, the family members were the same sort of people- vulnerable, loving, caring and wary of things like foreigners, inflation, malaria. And war.

On two occasions recently, I visited Karachi. Both times I felt I was just in another part of India. The people I met were like my own relatives- vulnerable, loving, caring and wary of war with a neighbour ethnically, culturally, racially, socially and economically exactly like themselves.

Pakistani-backed mujahideen have just waged a war on India. Tomorrow, I wouldn't be surprised if my daughter brought one home as a son-in-law. As long as his skin colour was light to wheatish, I couldn't care less.