It seems cruelly insensitive that one of the kaleidoscopic advertisements flashing over the luggage carousel at Budapest airport should promise new arrivals "the ride of your life" in a tank. For 155 euros, the visitor can have a "fun English-speaking guide" to drive the tank of his choice and take part in a weapons assembling competition. "I'm not sure there is anywhere else you can get this kind of adrenaline experience" the advertisement boasts.
It might also have promised takers the pleasure (for a hefty fee of course) of dressing up either as invading Soviet soldiers or as patriotic Hungarians defending their country's integrity. Perhaps two sets of charges would be appropriate in a land that has suffered invasion after invasion over the centuries. Magyars have struggled with Romans and Mongols, Ottomans and Habsburgs, Soviets and Nazis. But tanks in Budapest invoke the tragic heroism of only the 1956 revolution whose 61st anniversary falls on October 23. Living in England then, I remember the anguish and excitement at this first crack in what was called the Iron Curtain. Brute force mended the crack but couldn't heal it. There were public protests, petitions and street collections in Britain while volunteers tried to enlist to fight for a small and vulnerable nation's right to freedom. It could have been the gripping saga of yesterday's Spanish Civil War or today's - and tomorrow's - Catalonia.
Hungarians seem curiously unwilling to reminisce about that turbulent passage when Stalin's massive statue was toppled. There are spectacular monuments to Soviet wartime help and memorials against Nazi brutality. The plight of Jews is publicly lamented. A street sign commemorates Kemal Atatürk. The 'occupation' - euphemism for Soviet control - is mentioned only in passing. They can't have forgotten the 20,000 Soviet tanks rumbling through those very streets of Budapest I am walking today, the wounded and bleeding bodies dragged over the cobblestones or rallies outside the palatial domed parliament that reeks of Austro-Hungarian ostentation. We heard in 1956 of the desperate defiance of boys and girls staring in vain at the skies for the American warplanes that never came or massing on the Austrian border to welcome the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's troops who never appeared. Instead, we were regaled with harrowing broadcasts about thousands of refugees fleeing Hungary.
Dwight Eisenhower and the sanctimonious John Foster Dulles ("Dull, Duller, Dulles!" ran the not inappropriate joke) made fiery speeches about what another American president later called the "evil empire". But that was all. They didn't lift a finger to help Hungary. At the time we thought the United States of America didn't want to risk hotting up the Cold War. Looking back after all these years, I wonder if one reason for American acquiescence in Moscow's brutality was that empires stick by each other. Hungary's rejection of Soviet domination and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact were too much like the Confederacy's refusal to be ruled from Washington to be encouraged. The current US controversy over Confederate statues reminds us that the South's attempted secession still rankles. It's even been said that Mikhail Gorbachev was a more robust democrat than Abraham Lincoln. The Russian leader readily reconciled himself to his country's territorial disintegration to meet the aspirations of smaller nations like Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine and the rest while the American hero fought a bloody and cripplingly expensive war to prevent it.
India has shown in and over Jammu and Kashmir, Hyderabad, Junagadh, Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur, Khalistan and Sikkim that Lincoln's precedent appeals far more to our temperament than Gorbachev's. The very phrase, 'Akhand Bharat', speaks of a dream that is fraught with grave political and military danger. India's abstention when the United Nations voted on Hungary drew intense (if somewhat hypocritical) criticism across the Western world. It was the year of Suez which Jawaharlal Nehru denounced as "naked aggression", but Hungary seemed barely to ruffle his consciousness. He couldn't have lacked information. Day after day during the 1956 revolt, radio commentators reported that the Indian ambassador's car flying the Indian flag could be seen cruising slowly through the tense streets of strife-torn Budapest. Given Nehru's timorous response to the crisis, I thought at the time that the cruising car was frivolous diplomatic tourism. I was wrong.
Árpád Göncz put me right at a Calcutta Raj Bhavan dinner 34 years later. Nurul Hasan's guest had just become president of Hungary when he paid a State visit to India in 1990; he had been a young 'democratic socialist' protester in 1956, opposing not communism but Moscow's hegemony. The Indian diplomat in Budapest was his friend, Mohammed Ataur Rahman, charge d'affaires and not ambassador. Through Rahman, Göncz sent Nehru a copy of the Draft Proposal for a Compromise Solution to the Hungarian Question by the intellectual, István Bibó. Indian intervention may have saved Göncz's life when he was arrested and convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment. But Imre Nagy, valiant but trusting leader of the uprising, paid with his life for trying to uphold a people's right to determine their own future regardless of what the law might say.
That recalls another anniversary with a contemporary resonance: on October 15, 1940, Lluís Companys, then Catalonia's president, is believed to have cried out "For Catalonia" as Francisco Franco's firing squad riddled him with bullets in Barcelona's Montjuïc Castle. Carles Puigdemont, the present Catalan president, accompanied by all his ministers, laid a wreath on Companys's tomb last Sunday, the 77th anniversary of his judicial murder. The action acquired a particular poignancy from a warning by the spokesman for Spain's ruling Popular Party that if Puigdemont declared independence, he might "end up like the man who declared it 83 years ago". It was an obvious reference to Companys who proclaimed a Catalan State within a Spanish federal republic. But as blood boiled among the bizarrerie of Antoni Gaudi's fantastic architecture in Barcelona and in the small towns along the Mediterranean coast with their memories of Dali and Picasso, the Spanish ruling party spokesman, Pablo Casado, hastily tried to explain he hadn't meant that Puigdemont, too, would be killed. He had only meant that the Catalan leader would be jailed as Companys had been in an earlier phase of his struggle against the power of Madrid.
Memories of those grim years stalk the present as supporters of Spanish unity give the fascist salute at public meetings in Madrid and elsewhere. A dispute between those who support national unity and those who believe in a region's right to opt out of a federal arrangement is acquiring an ideological colouring. Perhaps fascism was never properly buried in Spain: I have witnessed fights breaking out in cafes over bands playing fascist tunes. No one has as yet accused Puigdemont and his supporters of being communists but the response of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and other European Union heads of government show how terrified leaders are of the men and women they claim to lead and on whose behalf they supposedly speak. As Potti Sreeramulu's death showed in 1952, history is shaped by men and events, not parliaments and statutes.
V.R. Nedunchezhiyan of the old Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam told me about the time Nehru's government made secession ultra vires to the Constitution that he wasn't giving up his long-term aim. But no more boasting like the Madras journalist who wanted to be his paper's first foreign correspondent in Delhi. The DMK's rising sun symbol would feature prominently in party propaganda but, remembering Sheikh Abdullah, the future Tamil Nadu chief minister would tread warily. Many small European nations have sought their distinctive destiny since then. Croatia was probably the first followed by Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and others. Catalonia might be next. Spanish law forbids it, of course, but laws are made by men. Men are not made for other people's laws.
