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- Do Indians love taking orders from a foreigner?
- By Dr Jay Dubashi
- To an Afghan, liberty comes first, everything else is secondary. To an Indian, to hell with liberty, as long as the white man offers you a good job in New York, with a car thrown in. In a couple of years from now, the Americans will have left Afghanistan, a sad lot. But we shall still have a prime minister taking orders from a foreigner, sixty years after the so-called Independence!
- The Afghans are not really a nation; they are more like a collection of tribes who most of the time fight against one another unless there is a strong force at the centre to bind them together. But no matter how bitterly they fight against each other, they are one when it comes to fighting a common enemy. One must remember that Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries of the world, if not the poorest, but this has not prevented them from uniting against a common enemy, even as rich as the United States or the Soviet Union. This is the third time in history they have put the invader to flight, though initially the invader came and was received as a friend.
- What I am concerned with is not what the Afghans did, but how the Americans and earlier, the British and the Russians were forced out of the country. How is it, one may ask, the Afghans repeatedly throw foreigners out of their country, which is not really a country and rarely has a government worth the name, while we Indians, or to be more precise, we Hindus, have not been able to do in a thousand years? Why is it that foreigners are able to stay put in Afghanistan only a few years-about ten years maximum-while they come and stay in India for centuries, rule over us as if it was their fathers' jagir, and we do nothing about it century after century, and, in fact, join them in running the country as their khidmatgars?
- A nation without self-respect is not a nation at all. The first rule of Independence is self-reliance, and pride is one's capacity and institutions. This is the main difference between an Afghan and an Indian. The Afghan will not leave the invader at peace, whether he comes with a tank or a missile, or with computers. A foreigner is a foreigner, period. For Indians, a foreigner is a demi-God, who brings in money and technology and latest films from Hollywood, never mind that, in the process, he enslaves you and saps your self-respect and leaves you maimed for life. This is why Naipaul said that Indians and Indian society were a damaged lot, damaged by centuries of alien rule and alien cultures.
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