Spectator's Journal/Nehru III
Anant, Victor
discovered. In fact, MaUon argues, we're "counting on it." In the many diaries he's read and the one he keeps himself, he finds there's always a "you" turning up, a person addressed. The...
...After all, before him was "the white goddess," affd, before her, the incorruptible Caesar...
...And if you're talking, it means you're alive...
...Diaries like vintage wines, meant to be shared--that's just what Mallon has done with a good deal of wit and even more understanding...
...Mallon's favorite diarist understood this and made no secret about it...
...Language is like that...
...To cap it all, I happen to be writing these notes from Pakistan, "the other side" of a turbulent subcontinent, an ally of the U.S and of China, India's b&e noire...
...he has no use for the kind of self-congratulatory exaggeration that mars so many literary studies today...
...he has given ominous threats about U.S...
...policy, as they prepare to talk turkey with a second-term Reagan Administration...
...Or can it hallucinate its JOURNAL way through history...
...Since he was sworn in as prime minister, Mr...
...For 'you...
...Mallon has no idea who his "you" is, but he knows he or she is there...
...He came to preach, not to prosper...
...lack of muscular thinking it remains under the tutelage of another waffling Nehi'u...
...Gandhi has spun a "Khadi Curtain" (khadi, for those who don't wear it, is homespun Indian cotton) around him...
...Grandpa made grandiloquent promises to take India out of the bullockcart age, and we can all see where that has got the average sacred cow...
...Rajiv Gandhi and his advisers on U.S...
...The diarist may not give conscious thought to it, but he cannot help but talk'to someone else when he writes...
...It is almost as if she staged it for her son and heir, psychomanipulated his succession just as the martyrdom of Mahatma Gandhi endowed his heir, Nehru, with a secondhand saintliness...
...But India simply does not have the economic wherewithal, the scale and reach, of an industrial imperial power...
...Hindus might proclaim the virtues of vegetarianism, but when it comes to ancestor-eating they're as cannibal as can be...
...He is, by all accounts, a qualified pilot, and with the requisite flying hours could even get a job in an international airline...
...I've seen some hysterical "purges" initiated by Nehru and by Indira...
...In fact, MaUon argues, we're "counting on it...
...Rajiv has been repeating, like a Sanskrit mantra, his pledge to follow in the footsteps of the Nehrus...
...Indian politicians naively assumed that they were heirs to the politics of their colonial masters...
...His grandfather came to tell the Americans what to do, not to learn from a nation which had freed itself from the same colonial values two centuries earlier...
...Sometimes when I'm writing on the right-hand leaf of a notebook I catch sight of a spelling or grammatical mistake I made on the left one the night before, and I correct it...
...Who will believe its pious rhetoric while India, as we all know, prides itself on its nuclear capability and membership in that same Nuclear Club...
...But it has been tacitly forgotten that, before her assassination, her Congress Party was in jitters, and dreaded facing the electorate...
...But he has also begun to show a weakness for Declarations--like his grandfather's Declaration of Panch-Sheela, the Five Principles of Non-Alignment, or his mother's "One Asia...
...Fortunately, Rajiv Gandhi is the first of the Nehrus who can actually earn a decent living if he is driven out of politics...
...This is just the kind of unforced observation that makes this book hum, especially when MaUon .." draws out its implications with conversational ease He lets matters speak for themselves...
...He has been forthright about India's "traditional" friendship with and everlasting debt to the Soviet Union...
...The question Rajiv Gandhi will have to answer is simple: Is he prepared to pilot his people safely into the future, or will he play Nehru all over again...
...weapons being made available to Pakistan...
...A necessary risk has not deterred me before...
...It may be your greatgreat-granddaughter or the fellow who buys her house and then discovers your diary left behind in the garage, but "someone will be reading and you'll be talking...
...Barbellion, published The Journal of a Disappointed Man just months before he died, determined to have his diary become his monument...
...But even before publication, he didn't hold back...
...He came to plead, not to trade...
...I understand that Mr...
...Which is as it should be...
...The diarist may be squeamish about those pages on which he didn't spare himself, but he certainly craves an audience for those others from which his style suddenly and inexplicably has lifted his thought in effortless ascent to skim the treetops of his days, circling over a gaudy fact here, swooping to a delicious conclusion there, soaring once more to the sky's own view under which the rag-tag clutter of daily life comes wonderfully into focus if only for a moment, its patterns obvious, its problems as small and as manageable as the toy houses and toy cars left so far below...
...SPECTATOR'S NEHRU III Karachi--After his first hundred days in power the odds now are heavily against these observations being taken in the proper spirit by Mr...
...by Victor Anant a facetious observation: The curse of Indian politics, as with most former colonial nations, is that, with independence, politics became an economic activity...
...This is more than THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985...
...Gandhi's public utterances sound like a cracked record...
...it connects us to others whether we will it or not...
...In the many diaries he's read and the one he keeps himself, he finds there's always a "you" turning up, a person addressed...
...Neither his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, nor his mother Indira, so tragically gunned down in her own front garden, could tolerate it when I asked them a well-intentioned, simple question...
...More than half the population lives below the poverty line...
...The recent Delhi Declaration to put an end to the nuclear arms race would have been all right coming from anywhere except India...
...It can make MIGs and put men into space, but its agriculture is still at the mercy of nature, its housing is still city-sidewalks or cowdung-thatched huts, it still cannot talk to itself in one language...
...It would be a tragic betrayal if, by the end of this century, India became a conglomeration of banana republics, or an unabashed Soviet satellite, only because, once again, for Victor Anant has written for the London Spectator and other publications...
...He has been priggish about the U.S...
...He says he is going to put India in "the twenty-first century...
...Her murder is charged with mythic density...
...As a bit of calculated populism it's fine...
...Neither Nehru nor Indira were enthroned with a show of such overwhelming goodwill, from India and around the world, as Rajiv...
...and has made predictable noises about the CIA's involvement with the Sikh movement...
...When he invites a friend to dinner, he tells us that he will "with some show of deliberation select a volume to read to him, drawing it from its division with lavish punctiliousness, and inquiring with an oily voice, 'A little of 1912?' as if we were trying wines...
...Writing, even the relatively shapeless writing of a diary, is a performance meant to display our mastery over the disparate facts of our existence...
...When Rajiv says he will run a clean government, no one asks who made corruption a way of life...
...To confound matters, paranoia is at a Himalayan high in India these days, with the bizarre disclosure of a "multinational corporation" of spies operating at the center...
...And what's a performance without an audience...
...Suffering from disseminated sclerosis that would cut him off at thirty, Bruce Frederick Cummings, writing as W.N.P...
...And it still has a Nehru at the top who thinks of India as a piece of inherited real estate...
...But, in India, politics became the prerogative of a leisure class, a landed aristocracy...
...Your 'you' may be even less palpable than mine, but someday," he assures us, "like the one you love, he'll come along...
...I know how scary it can be...
...Indeed, India has yet to find itself in the twentieth century...
...R~ajiv Gandhi was given one chance in a million (or should we say one chance on behalf of 700 million) to free India from the rhetoric of the past and face contemporary reality...
...Most Indians are like most Americans: They don't speak Russian or Albanian, they don't think in rubles, they don't want to work in Odessa or Azerbaijan, they prefer disco dancing to doing the gopek, and they like to vote their leaders into power...
...And, within its confines, no one is reckoned to be a patriot who does not join in a daily ritual of dung-throwing...
...It would be a shame if Rajiv Gandhi makes his first visit to the only country which understands India's potential, and can help India pull itself out of its mess, with all the inherited prejudices of the Nehrus...
Vol. 18 • April 1985 • No. 4
