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Is India Free?


A country is really free only when its citizens are free.  Freedom is not merely deliverance from foreign occupation.  Freedom is deliverance from poverty, injustice and other social evils as well as personal evils such as greed and jealousy which give birth to corruption of all sorts.  India is yet to be free.   

There are millions of people in India who go to bed hungry even after seven decades of independence.  There are millions who don’t have access to basic healthcare.  Our public distributions systems and primary healthcare systems are abject failures.  The country is still enslaved by poverty.  Can we call it a free country?

A man who has to carry the dead body of his wife on his shoulders for kilometres because he cannot afford to hire a vehicle should shake us out of our smugness.  He is a poignant symbol of the callousness that marks a governance which gives more importance to cows, idols and myths.

India needs deliverance from its holy cows and myths.  It is folly to keep looking back at the distant glorious past and claiming global superiority in the name of a bygone civilisation.  What we are today is all that matters.  All the thousands of our gods and goddesses, the elegant poetry in the sacred scriptures and the glory of an ancient language are rendered absurd by the 3671 children below the age of 5 that die every day in the country due to poverty-related causes.  There is nothing to be proud of when one out of every eleven children is working in order to earn their daily bread. 


Freedom is also a matter of attitudes.  Today India is a country whose people seem to be motivated more by hatred than anything else.  Suddenly all kinds of Senas have mushroomed spawning hydra-headed hatred.  If you advocate love and other human values, you are labelled antinational; you are asked to go to Pakistan.  Pakistan has become an obsessive antithesis of all that India is projected to be.  A whole section of citizens, a sizeable section, has become the abominable Other to be exiled if not be eliminated.  Slogans have turned sour.  Acid runs in veins.  Dead fishes’ eyes stare from sullen human faces. 

India has a long way to go to be free in spite of the highly developed infrastructure in its cities. In spite of the ascending line graphs in the development statistics.  In spite of the rhetoric in thunderous locution.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 160 which asks the question whether India is really free.





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Comments

  1. Jyotirmoy SarkarMarch 11, 2017 at 11:06 PM

    Some fixed indications towards certain people can be seen in many of your posts, i don't want wanna say at all they those people are fully correct but logically(emotionally also) its also true that there are reasons behind their such activities, when the base was not pure how can we expect the building will be strong...that's the case of India.
    All the time "what we are today is all that matters"...is not at all appropriate all the time, actually most of the time we cant ignore our past activities whether its about our lives or about a Nation. what we can see is the impact of past and no one can deny it...but with long and continuous practice we can overcome.

    just shared my thought....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 12, 2017 at 9:18 AM

      People in high positions are particularly visible and hence vulnerable to criticism. So if I raise certain questions on such people there's nothing surprising. I'm happy I'm not alone in that process. I'm sure you read newspaper and magazine articles which are much more critical than me when it comes to our politicians.

      Secondly, the past you are referring to and the one I referred to in the post are different. I'm objecting to the glorification of the ancient past. If we look at the recent past, you are right that the various Congress regimes were responsible for the mess that India became. But we voted for BJP to "make a difference" which they promised. But what difference have they made? That's all what I'm asking. India continues to be a worse mess. If it was corruption in Congress time, now it's corruption + religious fundamentalism + communal hatred + hollow Mann ki Baats.

      Delete
  2. sunaina sharmaMarch 13, 2017 at 4:38 PM

    Well put thoughts - freedom is not just physical liberation - mental enslavement is much harder to do away with

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 13, 2017 at 6:23 PM

      Something that contemporary India does not seem to understand.

      Delete

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