Skip to main content

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.





Labels:

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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In this Wonderland

I didn’t write anything in the last few days. Nor did I feel any urge to write. I don’t know if this lack of interest to write is what’s called writer’s block. Or is it simple disenchantment with whatever is happening around me? We’re living in a time that offers much, too much, to writers. The whole world looks like a complex plot for a gigantic epic. The line between truth and fiction has disappeared. Mass murders have become no-news. Animals get more compassion than fellow human beings. Even their excreta are venerated! Folk tales are presented as scientific truths while scientific truths are sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. When the young generation in Nepal set fire to their Parliament and Supreme Court buildings, they were making an unmistakable statement: that they are sick of their political leaders and their systems. Is there any country whose leaders don’t sicken their citizens? I’m just wondering. Maybe, there are good leaders still left in a few coun...
12 comments
Read more

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Death as a Sculptor

Book Discussion An Introductory Note : This is not a book review but a reflection on one of the many themes in The Infatuations , novel by Javier Marias. If you have any intention of reading the novel, please be forewarned that this post contains spoilers. For my review of the book, without spoilers, read an earlier post: The Infatuations (2013). D eath can reshape the reality for the survivors of the departed. For example, a man’s death can entirely alter the lives of his surviving family members: his wife and children, particularly. That sounds like a cliché. Javier Marias’ novel, The Infatuations , shows us that death can alter a lot more; it can reshape meanings, relationships, and even morality of the people affected by the death. Miguel Deverne is killed by an abnormal man right in the beginning of the novel. It seems like an accidental killing. But it isn’t. There are more people than the apparently insane killer involved in the crime and there are motives which are di...
7 comments
Read more

Whose Rama?

Book Review Title: Whose Rama? [Malayalam] Author: T S Syamkumar Publisher: D C Books, Kerala Pages: 352 Rama may be an incarnation of God Vishnu, but is he as noble a man [ Maryada Purushottam ] as he is projected to be by certain sections of Hindus? This is the theme of Dr Syamkumar’s book, written in Malayalam. There is no English translation available yet. Rama is a creation of the Brahmins, asserts the author of this book. The Ramayana upholds the unjust caste system created by Brahmins for their own wellbeing. Everyone else exists for the sake of the Brahmin wellbeing. If the Kshatriyas are given the role of rulers, it is only because the Brahmins need such men to fight and die for them. Valmiki’s Rama too upheld that unjust system merely because that was his Kshatriya-dharma, allotted by the Brahmins. One of the many evils that Valmiki’s Rama perpetrates heartlessly is the killing of Shambuka, a boy who belonged to a low caste but chose to become an ascetic. The...
8 comments
Read more

When Cricket Becomes War

Illustration by Copilot Designer Why did India agree to play Pakistan at all if the animosity runs so deep that Indian players could not even extend the customary handshake: a simple ritual that embodies the very essence of sportsmanship? Cricket is not war, in the first place. When a nation turns a game into a war, it does not defeat its rival; it only wages war on its own culture, poisoning its acclaimed greatness. India which claims to be Viswaguru , the world’s Guru, is degenerating itself day after day with mounting hatred against everyone who is not Hindu. How can we forget what India did to a young cricket player named Mohammed Siraj , especially in this context? In the recent test series against England, India achieved an unexpected draw because of Siraj. 1113 balls and 23 wickets. He was instrumental in India’s series-levelling victory in the final Test at the Oval and was declared the Player of the Match. But India did not celebrate him. Instead, it mocked him for his o...
6 comments
Read more