The Hindu Business Line : Where the head is held high. Really?

This week, the media will be brimming over with the nostalgia and celebratory mood that attends the 60th birthday of Independent India. Soon it will all die down, as these things do, and we shall presumably wait for the 75th or the Centenary — those of us who can think that far ahead, that is. One does not want to be a wet blanket, but the events of the past several weeks should give every thinking and sensitive person (voter, taxpayer and citizen) reason to pause an d reflect what it is that we are celebrating; and what we ought to do to preserve India as an entity that the great men and women of the country dreamed of — and not just a part of the worldwide marketplace.

A front page picture in this newspaper, to pick something at random, shows a farmer stepping into a draught animal’s job, pulling the plough. A BBC programme highlighting bonded child labour and usurious interest rates among weavers in the neighbouring town of Kanchipuram, does not even draw the ritual denials and expressions of regret. It goes unnoticed when this column highlights it. When the courts of justice pronounce the long-overdue verdicts on the accused in the Mumbai bomb blasts case, people cry hoarse and trade charges. The fact that the actor who got six years for his involvement acted in popular films and that his parents had a great reputation and political influence, are all trotted out repeatedly by the channels. And a debate is launched on whether the judiciary was fair. This public debate includes some who ought to know better, being professional lawyers or the people’s representatives.

No cry of outrage

A woman, celebrated non-conformist author and refugee from Bangladesh is roughed up at a book release function, on camera, by sitting legislators, who then have the temerity to say in a TV interview that their only regret is that they could not do more. And there is no cry of outrage from the leaders of the country. It is the same kind of political leadership which results in a strange first reaction to the ghastly attempt at setting fire to an airport in the UK. Support and help in bringing the perpetrators to justice takes a back seat. Instead, they call for calm and not jump to judgments that would hurt the sentiments of a ‘certain community’.

Atrocities, intolerance, denial of fundamental needs and rights all round do not make for a picture of glory or certainly not one worth gloating over. If Mahatma Gandhi were alive — or better still the liberal and nationalistic spirit were alive in some person today — what would he or she do? That would be good question to ask. Most likely they would observe a day of prayer, penitence and, perhaps, fasting and silence. There is certainly as much to rue, and ruminate over, as there is to recall with pride. I am tempted to suggest that pensive reflection and meditation are at least as fitting as any other to mark the big day on Wednesday.

Anywhere near awakening?

And we must remember to ask ourselves whether any of the patriotic songs we sing in such a lifeless ritual manner, at every important event, make any contact with reality at all. Are we anywhere near awakening to a state envisaged in Rabindranath Tagore’s poem? He did not live to see it but described India as the ‘heaven of freedom’: A country where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, where knowledge is free, where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls and where words come out from the depth of truth. Really?

S. RAMACHANDER