India’s many trials by fire

Fire is sacred in every religion. In Hinduism, Agni, the god of fire, is called to take earthly offerings heavenwards. In the Ramayana, Sita comes out unscathed from a test by fire proving her fidelity and chastity to Lord Rama. Parsi’s worship at the Fire Temple. In the Old Testament, Yahweh appears as fire on different occasions - a burning bush to Moses. The Quran mentions fire frequently.

Fire is destructive and transformative. Being forged in fire is transformative. Fire’s human value is so pronounced that it is part of the vocabulary of many languages. Being ‘forged in fire’ is not just a metallurgical process, it is a strong hint of the foundation of an individual’s character. The English idiom ‘trial by fire’, and its Hindi equivalent ‘Agni Pariksha’ provides a visual of a difficult time.

These figures of speech don’t just paint a picture of adversity, they suggest an opportunity to learn, reflect, and therefore promise metamorphosis. Countries have been through such processes. The US and its constitution were forged in British colonialism and the revolutionary war. Later, the civil war and then the civil rights movement freed African Americans and gave them constitutional guarantees.

India was born in the conflagration of Partition. Its kindling were centuries of British rule, and prior to that of warring monarchies. Modern India has gone through many an Agni Pariksha. Wars with Pakistan and China, terrorist attacks and insurgency; the nationwide civil unrest and subsequent declaration of Emergency by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to quell it; religious riots and massacres. The Congress and other parties bringing down democratically elected national and state governments by buying out politicians’ allegiance; the Congress misusing democratic and constitutionally protected administrative institutions for
political gain.

Other than the wars, nothing else resulted in a stronger nation. One could describe these as our leaders ‘playing with fire’, which means “to do something that could cause you trouble later”, as per Cambridge Dictionary. Being a democracy, troubles were caused for both leader and country.

With the BJP government blaming everything on the Congress, it is natural to assume they would have learned from their predecessor hauling the country through fire.

In the last eight years, India has had ominous skirmishes with Pakistan and China; unrest continues in various parts of India; NCRB data indicates cases registered under hate speech has increased four-fold between 2015 and 2020; BJP politicians have been recorded baying for the blood of minorities; even Prime Minister Narendra Modi has used dogwhistles against Indian Muslims; and the schadenfreude and prejudice of many journalists cannot be missed. Constitutional bodies such as the Election Commission kowtowing to the BJP has been reported on; the independence of the judiciary has been brought under a cloud; the BJP has found ways to force opposition politicians to switch allegiance to them, mostly recently in Maharashtra. India being labelled an “electoral autocracy” indicates that these recent forays into the fire may not have been positively transformative.

But India’s tryst with pyromania is not just political, constitutional, and administrative. Since 2014, the BJP has taken many decisions that have led citizens into fiery tests – demonetisation, faulty implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the bid to expand the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) beyond Assam, Modi’s sudden announcement of the lockdown in 2020, and the now-repealed farm laws. These decisions have scorched the country and her people, metaphorically and literally.

The youth protesting against Agnipath is the latest in this litany of officially sanctioned fire-walks.

The economic cost and the number of dead from these are immediate fallouts of India being dragged through fire. The outcomes of such incidents are neither time-bound nor independent of each other. To live embers, new ones are added. To the consequences of demonetisation were added the socio-economic disruption from the CAA, farm laws and the sudden lockdown. Similarly, many Indians, refuse to acknowledge the repercussions of the territorial ambitions of Hindu kings of the past but view only the Mughal era as a blot on the subcontinent’s history. To this is added the pain of Partition for which Muslims, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru are blamed, leading to increased political and religious animosity. Fire sacrifices are performed to beget boons from the gods. What boon has India received from these forced fiery tests? From whom and for whom?

I am reminded of “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” -- Billy Ocean’s hit, and Nietzsche’s aphorism “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. Maybe one day, India will receive a boon from these trials by fire -- the ability to recognise the limits to toughness no matter what the going is or what threat to life one survives. Until then, let’s recognise that boons such as Independence and our Constitution come by rarely and out of great sacrifices.

(The writer is a freelance journalist)