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The nostrums of anti-colonialism

Premen Addy

AGATHA CHRISTIE'S A Murder is Announced was for many years one of the most popular mysteries. The murder of democracy and the rule of law in Fiji is no mystery, but simply a re-run of a bad film of 1987 vintage, with a few extra scenes a nd faces to give the exercise a contemporary feel.

In 1987 Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka overthrew the elected civilian government of Mr. Timoci Bavadra, a man of Fijian stock, and made himself the people's tribune. Or, rather the tribune of a Melenesian/Polynesian herrenvolk. Under this semi-apartheid the cou ntry's Indians were excluded from power even as they were the dominant economic influence. The system did not last as, with the end of the Cold War, the US and its allies withheld critical support to the Rabuka regime. A new multicultural Constitution wa s worked out in 1997, and Mr. Mahendra Chaudhury, an ethnic Indian, won the election to become prime minister. The majority of his Cabinet was indigenous Fijians.

But working with the burdensome legacy of a decade of economic mismanagement and stagnation was never going to be an easy exercise, and identifiable racial scapegoats are always at hand when work replaces play as the measure of success. Playboy, failed b usinessman, slick talker and gangster George Speight, of mixed Fijian-European parentage, accompanied by his gunslinging mobsters, held the government hostage in Parliament, while others of the mob rampaged through the capital Suva, looting and burning I ndian businesses and demolishing the local TV station for broadcasting remarks considered disrespectful to Fiji's new fuehrer.

The Fijian military has clearly connived with the usurpers, with Col. Rabuka grumbling that democracy was a colonial import, and by implication, tainted by original sin. Alas, the banning of cannibalism, too, was also a colonial act. So, whether the rest oration of cannibalism comes to occupy a privileged place on the agenda of the `new order' will be awaited with some curiosity. Political cannibalism it most assuredly will be, for the civilised compromises that are the bedrock of civil society are now u nacceptable. The absolute of racial supremacy is the only principle on offer in the public domain.

In the midst of Col. Rabuka's anti-colonial lament comes news from Sierra Leone, another corner of the Third World, that its natives, maimed, murdered and generally terrorised by multitudes of their tribal brethren and contemptuous of the incompetence of the UN peace-keepers sent to protect them, are praying that units of the British military despatched to the country as an emergency measure remain, as the true guardians of a reliable peace. They would rather cling on to life under the protection of the ir former colonial masters, and are very happy, too, to spell out this preference before the world's television cameras and radios, than embrace martyrdom and joy everlasting in the nirvana of political correctness. Anti-colonialism, like the patriotism excoriated by Dr. Johnson, is proving to be the last refuge of many a Third World scoundrel. It has outlived any purpose it may have once had. It is the manifestation of a terminal inferiority complex that refuses to die. It is a castle of skin, tribe an d faith that lets in neither air nor light; where demons devour their prey in the darkness of perpetual night.

Nirad Chaudhuri was a free spirit who challenged the nostrums of received wisdom, for which he earned more than his share of brick-bats and political scorn. He was often maddeningly wrong, eccentric in his judgment of people and situations and causes; bu t he was also sufficiently enlightening to make a journey in his company a rewarding, even exhilarating, experience.

The mass ranks of yeomen fed on vats of cliches and mildewed dogmas never had a chance with Nirad Babu's rapier. One recalls, in particular, an assault on him, shortly after his death, by Mr. Shashi Tharoor, the UN Secretary-General Mr. Kofi Anan's spin doctor, whose one detectable gift is his ability to talk his way out of any UN-bungled operation, such as the present one in Sierra Leone, with bombastic fluency.

Mr. Tharoor was outraged that Nirad Chaudhuri had sought to dispel the odour of sanctity given off by the embalmed reputations of many of India's great and good. This was clearly one of life's lesser blasphemies, but these like any ladder may ascend to h eaven and commit the greatest blasphemy of all; question the Creator and send legions of his uninspired creations into paroxysms of righteous indignation. A Syrian novelist, Haider Haider, in a much acclaimed work, described God ``as a failed artist'' fo r all hell to break loose on the streets of Cairo.

There is cause and effect between irreverence and freedom and the respect for one's audience that this entails, but in taking on Nirad Chaudhuri Mr. Tharoor was punching well beyond his weight. This was no UN matter. It is a serious human matter to celeb rate dissent as a necessary condition of our being, as an antidote to the drab conformity that threatens to chasten us into a common shape.

The hobgoblins of anti-colonialism come in all shapes, sizes, colours and nationalities. In a bid to re-ignite a career that has turned flat, a former Indian High Commissioner to Britain, who is now a sitting member of Parliament in New Delhi, seeks to i nitiate a movement for the return of the Kohinoor from the British Government. A previous demand had led to the Pakistan regime of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto making a rival claim as the true legatee of the famous diamond, not to speak of Iran where the conqueri ng Nadir Shah took it as his plunder from Delhi. If a serious point is to be made, then Mr. Kuldip Nayar and his friends should petition the ayatollahs in Teheran to return Shah Jehan's Peacock Throne, which was also part of Nadir Shah's booty, to India as a venture to strengthen the anti-colonial Indo-Iranian bonding. Shrewd human rights activist that he is, Mr. Nayar would not want to do anything so rash. Like us lesser mortals, he values his well-being.

***

An investigative Guardian report revealed disturbing evidence of the recruitment of young British Muslims for jehads in Kashmir, Chechnya, Kosovo and West Asia. The recruiting organisation, Al-Muhajourin, is led by a London-based cleric called Sheikh Oma r Bakri-Mohammed who says: ``I believe in the divine cause for Muslims to struggle''. The Sheikh's recruitment drive has entered British university campuses, much to the alarm of the President of the National Union of Students, Mr. Andrew Pakes, who desc ribed such activity as ``morally reprehensible. I condemn the behaviour utterly. It is morally wrong to recruit students via universities to become involved in paramilitary training and campaign of violence,'' he pronounced.

Al-Muhajourin targets Israel, Russia and India for its holy wars. Its recruits are taken through an elaborate global network to the US, where it is easier to procure weapons, and are housed and trained in special camps.

It is perhaps in this context that a Court of Appeal in London turned down a plea against the British Home Secretary, Mr. Jack Straw's deportation order against Mr. Shafiq Ur Rehman, an Oldham-based Pakistani cleric who was accused of recruiting British Muslims to fight in Kashmir. Mr. Rehman's counsel has been given time to make a final appeal to the House of Lords, but Lord Woolf, the Master of the Rolls, who sat on the Bench with two other judges, said that terrorism today transcended national bounda ries and had to be tackled in a manner appropriate to this perception. He went on to say that Mr. Rehman's activity in Britain to promote a campaign of violence in Kashmir, if unchecked, could damage Indo-British relations.

What is at stake here is not some demented aspect of anti-colonial solidarity, some incomprehensible mantra of non-alignment, but the principles and practices of civil society and democratic governance that have a transcending civilisational significance .

Prof. Paul Wilkinson, Director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews, puts it well: ``It does underline the fact that we are dealing with terrorism in a world environment, it is not confined to t he national territory any more. That is why we need the greater reach that the new (British) anti-terrorist legislation will give''.The Third World solidarist may not only lose a profitable way of life preaching and hectoring national and international a udiences; the creature is fast becoming a member of an endangered species, a victim of its own poisonous emissions on the road to extinction.

The loss and destruction of high culture will be among the first casualties to every triumphant bigotry whatever the anti-colonial plumage. The passing of one of England's great novelists, Anthony Powell, at the end of March at the ripe age of 94, marked the passing of an age. His 12-volume novel sequence A Dance To the Music of Time is a 20th century panorama of the changing life and manners of British society refracted through a gallery of colourful and memorable characters.

More recently, Sir John Gilgud, the country's foremost knight of the theatre died at 96. The critic Benedict Nightingale wrote in The Times: ``With the death of John Gilgud we have lost the last surviving member of the triumvirate that for much of the la st century dominated the British theatre ... Laurence Olivier was the most fiery and physically volatile, Ralph Richardson the earthiest and quirkiest, but Gilgud was the most vocally exquisite, intellectually elegant and spiritually fine.''

Lee Strasberg, the American acting teacher, remarked: ``When Gilgud speaks the verse, I can hear Shakespeare thinking.'' He was of such stuff as dreams are made on. Gilgud's gaffes are now theatrical legend. Richard Attenborough tells of a banquet at whi ch Gilgud turned to his neighbour, the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, with the conversational gambit: ``Tell me, where are you living now?''

There must already be much laughter in Heaven.

(The author, a visiting tutor in Modern Asian History at Kellogg College, is editor of the London-based India Weekly.)