When Wing Commander Shubhanshu Shukla goes to the International Space Station later this year on board an American rocket, he may perhaps not know how his destiny is linked to a small church in Kerala, and a 600-year-old college of Britain’s Oxford University.
Connecting India’s second astronaut – after the first, Squadron leader Rakesh Sharma fifty years earlier – is the improbable Mary Magdalene, one of the few women associated with the Apostles who accompanied Jesus Christ in his three-year public ministry before his betrayal, trial and execution in distant Jerusalem.
Her name adorns many religious and educational institutions around the world. For our story, the most important one is a small church in the south of Kerala state.
The St Mary Magdalene church in Thumba is the ‘manger’ where the Indian space programme was born some 65 years ago at the hands of Vikram Sarabhai, son of a billionaire and arguably India’s first space and nuclear scientist, together with Homiji Bhabha, both hand-picked by prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
Sarabhai met with the Catholic Bishop, Peter Bernard Pereira, who readily agreed to give the church over for space research. The Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launch Station (TERLS), now the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, became home to its first engineer director, APJ Abul Kalam. As President of India, Kalam later wrote: “The prayer room was my first laboratory, the bishop’s room was my design and drawing office.”
This is as story worth retelling as Indians reach to the stars, via the rear side of the moon. Many, if not most, of India’s show pieces since Independence 77 years ago are fruit of seed shown by the multiple giant ‘navratna’ Nehru invited to his circle to implement his, and Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of a new, modern India.
This would be an India wise in its inherited spirituality and philosophy, but in tune with the cutting edge physical and life sciences, engineering, and production lines.
His successors have tried to interpret his vision in their own way. They brought to the task many nuances of their own upbringing and persona. But the foundations, though laid in a blood-soaked earth following a chaotic Partition, were strong. On these each government built, storey by storey, the edifices we see today.
Prime among them is democracy. As the cusp of the first and second quarters of the 21st century, battered though it has been in a decade of ideological confrontations, India, or Bharat if you so prefer, can proudly declaim the strength and persistence of the salient pillars of its democracy – fraternity, liberty, a care for the least and the weakest.
If politics of governance erode or chip away any of them, the courts come to the rescue of the people. If the politicians, bureaucracy, the courts or other constitutional offices seem to cross limits set for them in the Constitution, the people take over. Regimes are changed peacefully, artlessly. Booth capturing by musclemen, tricks of the moneybags, and gimmicks of digital voting machines have failed to warp the popular vote.
Several of those elected to rule have, sometimes, wanted to reign. Each time, they were summarily tamed by the people. Indira Gandhi and decades later, a more recent, avatar have found the powerful ordinary mostly poor and middle-class people too strong to trifle with for long.
Documenting events, investigating exceptions and speaking with the people involved for close to 55 years, it is clear that India which so craves for an Olympic gold, is not fully aware how well it has run the Democracy race, across hurdles which made others struggle.
If nothing else, the mess in the neighbourhood is as good a reminder of this as any. Bangladesh is a remarkable example.
Pakistan was founded on the basis of religion, and birthed in the bloodies of partitions in any country in modern times. Bangladesh was born in the heady cauldron of culture, ethnicity, mother tongue, but is struggling with primeval ghosts of religious extremism, military ambitions and the dictatorial ambitions of two women, both with extremely traffic and painful pasts. One is he surviving child of an assassinated and much-loved mass leaser, the other the widow of a military dictator who, nonetheless, did help settle a two-party system in the nascent country.
Time will tell how Bangladesh takes shape after its current quake which has taken over 600 lives – of students, police, Awami League members, Hindus.
If Islamic theocracies don’t work well in Asia, as Pakistan and Bangladesh show in two very different ways, Nepal proved that Hindu monarchies are no better glue to keep people together.
The monarchies which Nehru once helped survive, in not actually thrive, away from their yoke of a powerful clan, eventually perished under the weight of their own misrule. The last generation ended for good in a patricidal massacre in the palace. The long years of a Maoist insurgency has segued into a political system of merging and breaking coalitions, powered shred within a handful of leaders.
Sri Lanka, the serendipitous island, is possibly in the worst shape, worse than Pakistan. It barely survived a war that politicians and the Buddhist Sangha waged on their own young. Barely out of that bloodbath, the same group of ethnic politicians, whatever their party labels, backed by the same Sangha, embarked on one of the longest and bloodiest civil wars. It took its toll not only the Tamil north and east of the island’s population, but on India. Rajiv Gandhi, who had sought to intervene in the Tamil Sinhala existential conflict, was assassinated once he lost office, and with it the bomb-proof security which could perhaps have saved his life. Two decades later, the island is apolitical and an economic wreck.
Looking at Pakistan, any country of the world would say: “There, but for the Grace of God, go I”. Born Islamic but secular, as its founder Jinnah proclaimed to the world, with the best brains of the sub-continent at the helm of affairs, it has in seven decades degenerated to a level where political scientists cannot tell if at the moment it is democratic, or the army controls its affairs.
Riven with ethnic strife, terrorism, a cesspool of corrupt politicians, Pakistan has in recent months seen a once ruling political party all but outlawed, its founders in jail. A defeated set of politicians, their leaders in exile to escape more charges of corruption, are called back by the army to set up a government. A moot question whose hand is on the lever of power, and on the key to the treasury.
A perhaps wounded secularism, a multi-cultural, multi-religious, multilingual society that balks at being confined in artificial and forced uniformity, that is raucous and sometimes acrimoniously noisy, India is, yet, an object of envy in this part of the world, perhaps in the world at large.
(John Dayal is an author, Editor, occasional documentary film maker and activist)