An Open Letter from India to America

There can be no peace between the slaver and the enslaved, and the dreams of one are inevitably at the cost of the other. 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

We have a long history of lecturing each other, Indians and Americans, and an equally long history of taking umbrage. This is not that. Some of you are family, blood of my blood, and some of you are friends from university, from work, from just sharing the same values and fighting similar fights over the decades. I have only sympathy to give, and empathy too, since we too rushed headlong into the abyss that you now find yourself in.

We, too, thought it would never happen to us, that our democracy was too deeply ingrained, born out of the blood and fire of colonialism, deepened by a hundred thousand smaller protests as it widened to include those that had been kept out of the promises of equal rights. Yes, there are profound differences between us, and while you gloried in calling yourself the oldest democracy, we gloried in calling ourselves the largest.

Both of us knew the appellations were more aspiration than reality, a pledge redeemed “not wholly or in full measure,” as Nehru put it. Too many of our own had neither security or freedom, and our history was – if anything – the history of our own people rebelling to snatch the rights that we so mockingly promised them on paper, but withheld in practice.

Still, even that story is a positive one, in which we are slowly marching towards freedom for all. What we forgot, glossed over, is that as some were freed from exploitation others were no longer free to exploit. For those who had made their wealth on exploitation, whose very identity was forged on the idea that they were free to exploit others, freedom for all was not a dream, it was a nightmare. And, in turn, they reached for the symbols of our nightmares: a thuggish male bullying, caste hierarchy, slavery, and Nazism – which itself drew inspiration from colonialism and Jim Crow segregation.

They did not hide these things, even if we shied away from acknowledging them for what they were. We dismissed them as deadenders, holdovers from a past that was fast slipping away even in memory. We thought them deluded, in bad taste, called them a ‘radical fringe’ when they were the heart and soul of a worldview that demanded that some people be dominated by other people, or face extermination. We offered equality to people who wanted subjugation, forgetting that liberty and justice are not open to debate in a democracy, but are the very framework that makes democracy possible.

To be sure, not all were so sanguine. Those that had suffered under the jackboot in our flawed democracies. Those who had seen that the man with the gun was the law, and rights were written on pieces of paper that could not deflect a racist’s bullet, they knew, they heard, and they did not fool themselves into believing that there was any middle ground, because there was not.

The idea that there could be compromise across this divide was false. There is no détente between freedom and its enemies because freedom in one place, freedom for one set of people, inspires freedom among others. And when they screamed, “We will not be replaced!” and we dismissed it as a paranoid fantasy, it was we who were wrong, not them. Because, really, did we aspire to live among bigots, did we aspire to live among the exploiters, did we desire to find some common ground with the corrupt and the vicious? Did we wish to be at peace with the Nazis? No, we did not, and for those whose fortunes and identity rested on just this – on bigotry and exploitation, on the contempt of this person or that – our efforts to provide justice for all were intolerable.

There can be no peace between the slaver and the enslaved, and the dreams of one are inevitably at the cost of the other, or as one of your great men said, quoting from the Bible, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

We duped ourselves, told ourselves that the frontiers of freedom, of democracy, could be expanded without making enemies. We were complacent, and we were wrong.

Of course, we knew of medieval men in faraway caves, of dictators who spoke with heavy accents. Our media and academia were good at showing them up and exposing them, it was just as they turned inward that they faltered and equivocated. What we knew to be fascism when it spoke in a foreign tongue somehow became ‘traditional values’ when spoken in our own. Those were our relatives and friends, colleagues, and classmates, and if we were to acknowledge what they were saying, actually listen to them instead of smoothening their rough edges, excusing their lapses, and passing off dehumanisation as just a joke gone wrong, then we would have had to admit that we needed to fight, and we needed to fight our own.

That requires moral courage. Few have ever stood in the face of a lynching. Fewer still have had the courage to simply speak up against their buddies when they have dehumanised or harassed others for simply being others, for existing. The rage against politically correct speech was always the rage of those wishing to dehumanise and dismiss the existence of marginalised groups. In our country it was the rage against secularism, in your country it has taken many forms, from rage against affirmative action to rage against diversity, equity, and inclusion. In all countries and in all languages it is one and the same thing: the unwillingness to believe that all humans are created equal, and everybody deserves a fair chance. Without this belief there is no democracy, and yet we continued to debate these people as if democracy itself was up for debate, and because the terms of the debate were inevitably framed by those with the most money, democracy turned out to be for sale.

Your ordeal has just begun, ours continues, and while I hope you are quicker to confront and oust your petty tyrant than we have been with ours, I have to warn you that the fight is a long one. The issue is not just of one government or another, or one political party in power, it is about the type of government itself. The good news is that freedom survives even the bleakest circumstances, and liberty is a dream that has endured despite countless regimes declaring their victory, only to be undone and become only object lessons about the hubris of would-be tyrants. The only thing that I would say, that I would request, is that in your fight for freedom please listen to those who were first attacked, who understood how clearly liberty was threatened because their liberty was threatened first, and it is only when they are made secure will you have a freedom and democracy that lasts. It is a lesson that one of our own tried to teach us, to consider every policy through the lens of how it impacts the weakest amongst us, and only then go forward. His name was Gandhi, and we forgot that lesson of his and are having to painfully relearn it. As a friend, all I can offer is the example of our own mistake, and the hope that you learn faster than us.

Omair Ahmad is an author. His last novel, Jimmy the Terrorist, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and won the Crossword Award.

© The Wire