Skip to main content

Is India Independent?




When the first Prime Minister hoisted the Tricolour in the Red Fort and celebrated India’s “tryst with destiny”, Mahatma Gandhi was in Calcutta trying to bring peace between the two warring religious communities.  The Mahatma did not celebrate the Independence.  He was sad.  India had not become independent, according to him, because real independence is liberation not only from colonial powers but also from the evils within the human heart.  Until every Indian is free from ignorance and superstition, from hatred and violence, India is not free, argued Gandhi. 

India is not free even today, seven decades after Independence.  India is still haunted by the spectres of communalism.  The Mahatma must still be weeping.

But the Mahatma has been driven out from the country.  He can weep elsewhere.  The history textbooks in the BJP-governed states are being rewritten without any mention of Gandhi and Nehru.  Rajasthan has already replaced these visionary leaders with Savarkar, Hedgewar, Deen Dayal Upadhyay and religious leaders like Vivekananda and Aurobindo. 

Amit Shah releasing a publication at the inauguration of 29th Savarkar Sahitya Sammelan, dedicated to Savarkar's life and works, in Mumbai in April. [Frontline] 
As an article in the latest Frontline says, Savarkar deserves to be introduced to school students because he is ‘said to have led a march of his classmates to stone a mosque after rumours of cow slaughter gained currency. This was his “revenge” against the “atrocities” committed against Hindus during Hindu-Muslim riots.’  The writer goes on to say that ‘If Savarkar stoned a mosque as a boy, it is almost in the fitness of things that today he is being resurrected in school textbooks by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has in its ranks men and women who watched or abetted the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.’

None of these ‘heroes’ projected by BJP in the new textbooks made any significant contribution to the freedom movement.  But they contributed much, very much indeed, to the communal hatred which was what Gandhi and Nehru, along with many others, tried to combat.  Bringing such people as role models for young students may yield some temporary political dividends but will be disastrous in the long run.

The present leadership in the country is playing with volatile religious sentiments with nefarious motives.  I know there will be powerful rhetoric delivered from Red Fort’s ramparts tomorrow.  I also know that the rhetoric will be deadlier than atom bombs.  Insidious power of hatred concealed in patriotic coating. 

No, it’s not Independence that will be celebrated.  I stand with the Mahatma wherever he is.  I wish I could redress his grief.

Comments

  1. People are very clever and they understand everybody's agenda.Both parties have their own flaws.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. People are clever enough to understand agenda but not intelligent to understand life. Hence so many flaws.

      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

Taliban and India

Illustration by Copilot Designer Two things happened on 14 Oct 2025. One: India rolled out the red carpet for an Afghan delegation led by the Taliban Administration’s Foreign Minister. Two: a young man was forced to wash the feet of a Brahmin and drink that water. This happened in Madhya Pradesh, not too far from where the Taliban leaders were being given regal reception in tune with India’s philosophy of Atithi Devo Bhava (Guest is God). Afghanistan’s Taliban and India’s RSS (which shaped Modi’s thinking) have much in common. The former seeks to build a state based on its interpretation of Islamic law aiming for a society governed by strict religious codes. The RSS promotes Hindutva, the idea of India as primarily a Hindu nation, where Hindu values form the cultural and political foundation. Both fuse religious identity with national identity, marginalising those who don’t fit their vision of the nation. The man who was made to wash a Brahmin’s feet and drink that water in Madh...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...