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.





Comments

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Something that contemporary India does not seem to understand.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The

Country without a national language

India has no national language because the country has too many languages. Apart from the officially recognised 22 languages are the hundreds of regional languages and dialects. It would be preposterous to imagine one particular language as the national language in such a situation. That is why the visionary leaders of Independent India decided upon a three-language policy for most purposes: Hindi, English, and the local language. The other day two pranksters from the Hindi belt landed in Bengaluru airport wearing T-shirts declaring Hindi as the national language. They posted a picture on X and it evoked angry responses from a lot of Indians who don’t speak Hindi.  The worthiness of Hindi to be India’s national language was debated umpteen times and there is nothing new to add to all that verbiage. Yet it seems a reminder is in good place now for the likes of the above puerile young men. Language is a power-tool . One of the first things done by colonisers and conquerors is to

Diwali, Gifts, and Promises

Diwali gifts for me! This is the first time in my 52 years of existence that I received so many gifts in the name of Diwali.  In Kerala, where I was born and brought up, Diwali was not celebrated at all in those days, the days of my childhood.  Even now the festival is not celebrated in the villages of Kerala as I found out from my friends there.  It is celebrated in the cities (and some villages) where people from North Indian states live.  When I settled down in Delhi in 2001 Diwali was a shock to me.  I was sitting in the balcony of a relative of mine who resided in Sadiq Nagar.  I was amazed to see the fireworks that lit up the city sky and polluted the entire atmosphere in the city.  There was a medical store nearby from which I could buy Otrivin nasal drops to open up those little holes in my nose (which have been examined by many physicians and given up as, perhaps, a hopeless case) which were blocked because of the Diwali smoke.  The festivals of North India

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so