Gotta serve somebody

There’s been one big story in India for the last few weeks, and it concerns Varun Gandhi, the rebel scion of the dynasty that brought us Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, and very much the saffron sheep of the family. He’s said some nasty things about Muslims and spent a few nights in prison for his troubles.

Of course, whenever one of the Nehru-Gandhi clan so much as wiggles their toes it’s front-page news; and in young Varun, the de facto royal family seems to have found its own Prince Harry.

The row brings to mind, though, a conversation I’ve been having regularly. In India in general, and in Bombay in particular, the religious-secular society dreamed of by Mahatma is ostensibly a reality: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jews, Jains, Buddhists and Parsis seem to get along pretty well, give or take the odd communal riot when the weather gets too hot. Hindus are the overwhelming majority of course – over 80% across India – but the Prime Minister is a Sikh, the leader of the biggest party a Christian, the President until a couple of years ago a Muslim, and nobody’s remotely bothered. Think for a moment what the reaction would be if that happened in England.

But there’s one religious minority that they can’t seem to understand. We atheists are the odd ones out in India: it’s a country that equates godlessness with rootlessness. The sense here is that it doesn’t matter which set of ancient stories you live by, as long as you’ve got some. As Shah Rukh Khan – Bollywood heartthrob megastar, Muslim, and extremely intelligent human being – recently said about the Quran, the Bible, the Tora and the Gita: “same novel, same topic, just different languages. They are just translations”. Which makes me some kind of book-burner.



I was thinking about this while watching the news coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. I was twelve when it happened, and it coincided with my only brief flirtation with religion. Just an adolescent phase I was going through… ;-)

(It tickled me to see the culture minister interrupted with a chant of “Justice for the 96” to the tune of ‘Go West’ by the Village People. Not because there’s anything funny about the cause, but because that song’s become such an all-purpose football anthem for beered-up hardcases: “one-nil to the Arsenal”, “you’re shit and you know you are”, "Jon Main is the dog’s bollocks”, etc. Not bad for a song about American gay men migrating to San Francisco in the 1970’s in search of, well, something that most football fans probably would rather not think about. But I digress.)

And of course the semi-religious memorial service was held in a place of worship called Anfield football ground, and culminated in the collective singing of that great hymn of devotion, You’ll Never Walk Alone. The greatest performance of that old song is by Johnny Cash, accompanied by nothing but an enormous pipe organ, recorded in a cathedral.



Yesterday the voting began in the general elections. It’ll take a month to complete, followed by several more weeks of horse-trading since no party is likely to get more than 30% of the seats. To the untrained eye, it seems like the national contest is between one lot who are corrupt and incompetent (with the honourable exception of the PM himself); and another lot who are bigoted, corrupt and incompetent. In Maharashtra we’re blessed with a third major lot, who are violent, bigoted, corrupt and incompetent.

It’ll almost certainly be Dr Singh, who’s 70-something, or Mr Advani, who’s 80-something, that emerges on top of the pile when the dust settles (hopefully not literally). But the gerontocracy is set to be short-lived (very possibly literally): in the Congress party, Dr Singh will almost certainly give way in a few years to Rahul Gandhi, who is young, handsome, intelligent and, oh, he’s one of the Family.

The other lot, meanwhile, didn’t have any obvious pretenders to their crown. Until recently, that is, when a young man started spouting dangerous nonsense about Muslims, got himself a very short jail term, got himself on every front page every day for several weeks, and bingo – we’ve got ourselves a contender. His rise to prominence shows the fragility of the secular consensus: but that’s the power you have when your last name’s Gandhi.