Tryst With Destiny

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

Amit links to yet another Peggy Noonan masterpiece -- having written for Ronald Reagan, her fluency with words and ideas puts pretenders like Arundhati Roy to shame.

Ms. Noonan has been reading "Freedom at Midnight" -- from which she draws the lesson that political leadership, by construction, isolates even the most well-meaning of leaders from the people they seek to lead. Consequently, they are blinded by an urgent sense of personal and historical mission -- ground realities of the little people figure little in these cosmic calculations.

This is why, she concludes, India bled upon partition -- for its leaders (except Gandhi) had no idea of what was about to follow. They were rushing towards their respective trysts with destiny with little regard for the grass they were trampling upon.

If, conversely, Mountbatten wasn't in such a hurry to achieve Indian independence, Jinnah might have fallen to TB, the partition might never have happened, and Gandhi -- the singularly towering Indian over two millennia -- might have died peacefully of old age, instead of gunshot wounds.

There are parallels here for Iraq. Ms. Noonan is passive-aggressively attacking the (elitist) neoconservative zeal for democratizing Iraq -- and the greater Middle East. Perhaps, she seems to be suggesting, slowing down is a better notion.

We don't disagree with a lot of what she has to say. While we are firm believers in neoconservatism and the (Leninist!) idea of "vanguard elites" leading ideological revolutions, we readily concede the structural risk of elitist isolation from the masses -- causing bad decision-making.

On India's partition though, we disagree. It wasn't an old man's hidden disease or a dashing Viceroy's bullheadedness, or a democratic idealist's personal ambition that savagely tore India apart -- India split because it could no longer sustain its internal social contradictions that had simmered for hundreds of years ever since Mahmoud swooped down from the mountains near Ghazni.

Similar contradictions are now playing out their tandava the world-over.

Regardless of Jinnah, Mountbatten, or Nehru, India was therefore likely destined for a tryst with communal bloodletting.

Perhaps they could have slowed down this horror -- but it's hard for us to imagine a powerful change of power as we faced in India not leading to this kind of unfortunate rite of passage. What do our readers think?

The good news is that, at least in India, this sacrifice became the foundation for our political modernity and, increasingly, our economic prosperity. Also, in secularism -- no matter how flawed our version is -- we began shaping, for the first time, a socio-political construct for seriously reconciling our internal contradictions.

Pakistan, on the other hand, has little to show for the horrors it summoned into being. This is why it is likely to suffer the fate of the erstwhile USSR.