Hamid Ansari has retired in a blaze of glory. His convocation address at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, effectively his farewell speech, was vintage Ansari, getting his message across without transgressing the lakshman rekha of constitutional propriety. He quoted not fewer than 34 authorities, from 17th century philosopher John Locke to the contemporary Israeli scholar Yael Tamir, to make his point. On assuming office a decade ago, Hamid learned to muffle his deepest thoughts in citations from others. While most of us wondered from where he got his vast erudition, I could almost hear Hamid quietly chuckling at his Mark Antony act!
Evaluating our democracy, the vice president’s departing assessment was that, while on the “procedural count,” such as regular elections, “the record gives cause for much satisfaction, but the score is less emphatic on the substantive aspects”.
Thus, he argues, whereas “ours is a plural society” comprising an “accretion of identities” and “layered Indianness,” the “ground reality (is) of exclusions arising from stratification, heterogeneity and hierarchy”. But we have been so unsuccessful in addressing these inherited inequalities that, “public satisfaction with the functioning of the elected bodies is breeding cynicism with the democratic process itself”.
So, we are faced with “vociferous demands for affirmative action and militant protest politics” outside legislatures, being answered with a politics of “purifying exclusion.” This, he underlines, has “enhanced apprehensions of insecurity of identity among segments of our citizen body, particularly Dalits, Muslims and Christians.” Therefore, he continues, “we are a polity at war with itself…. The process of emotional integration has faltered”.
Hence we are left with “an increasingly fragile national ego that threatens to rule out dissent,” and takes us towards “hyper-nationalism” and “the sanctification of military might”. This, he warns, will lurch us out of the “liberal nationalism,” our nation has long espoused, into a dangerous new phase of “cultural nationalism”, a self-description by the sangh parivar as their brand of nationalism (except that the quote is about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu!) Given the present establishment’s fascination for everything Israeli, Ansari cleverly cites an Israeli academic to point out that whereas liberal nationalism “celebrates the particularity of culture with the universality of human rights,” cultural nationalism “promotes intolerance and arrogant patriotism”.
The answer to all this, he concludes, lies in knowing that “the ‘other’ is none other than the self”. The Mahatma did not put it better.
As we are close friends since our days together in the Indian Foreign Service, I am privy to the source of his vast treasure house of learning. He once told me that on joining the service, he had spent his entire “books allowance” to buy all the volumes of the memoirs of Leon Trotsky!
Illustration: Bhaskaran
When prime minister Narasimha Rao decided to upgrade our Israel relations to ambassadorial level, I gave vent to my concerns in Parliament, arguing that if we had to have an ambassador in Israel, we must not let Tel Aviv dictate to us the religion of our ambassador. I heard Atal Bihari Vajpayee in a loud stage whisper inquire, “Yeh kiski baath kar raha hai? (Who is he talking about?)” and the person next to him whispering back, “Inke dost, Hamid Ansari (His friend, Hamid Ansari).”
He has not only equalled Dr S Radhakrishnan’s record of serving two successive terms as vice president, but also matched him in both scholarship and compassion. If only India had found a president in Hamid Ansari and a vice president in Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the India of our dreams would have been realised. As it is, we have to make do with what we’ve got.
Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.
