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. Goutami NewsAugust 15, 2017 at 6:47 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 15, 2017 at 9:52 PM

      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
47 comments
Read more

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...
12 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
12 comments
Read more

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...
19 comments
Read more