Musings on the 72 nd Independence Day

                                            Musings on the 72 nd Independence Day

Abraham Lincoln’ Gettysburg address started with “Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation…:” I am no Lincoln nor shall I ever be called to deliver the World Gettysburg address like what Lincoln did in 1863. Since I am yet to touch four score years, I will conveniently drop it and start my musings on the Independence day with “ Seven years ago…” Before you wonder what am I  going to say about 2011( seven years ago) as nothing sensational happened then, I will relieve you of your curiosity as seven years ago, before we got our Independence, I was born. To be more precise, seven years and two days ago I was born on the 13^th, i.e., an unfortunately reviled number in most cultures except in Hinduism and in Greek belief. In Hindu mythology it is dedicated to Lord Shiva (tryodashi) who blesses the 13th born person with health, prosperity and happiness while the Greeks associate it with their most powerful God Zeus  the 13^th in their pantheon, symbol of incorruptible power and divinity.  Being born in a Hindu family and having a love for Greek culture, I preferred to consider myself akin to Shiva and Zeus and not to Judas the 13^th disciple who betrayed his master, Jesus.

 Birthday celebrations in my early years were never there. In those days one day wass like any other day and therefore no special significance was to be attached to the day you were thrown into existence. But for me all this changed in my later years, It was a serendipitous coincidence that my birth star also came on the15^th august one particular year(though I don’t recall when it was). My father,a patriot to the core decided to celebrate 15^th august as my birthday that year  .It gave me a feeling of greatness and excitement that I was born on Independence day and that I would soar high as a free bird like Livingstone’s seagull. It was certainly a feeling of “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven…” That was 71 years ago. Meantime my hospital records showed that I was 13^th born. With the passage of time, the  period of youth changed and so was the joyous spirit of inhaling freedom.

Three score and eleven years have gone since that blissful dawn. The world has changed and life today moves at a faster pace than we would have dreamt. In many respects we are almost free from  diseases like TB, Cholera, Small pox etc though other lifestyle induced diseases have been on the rise. Medical advancement has given us better longevity, though one cannot say better living conditions especially to many who are in the lower income bracket. More schools have been opened but we are not free from illiteracy among million children  in the rural and tribal areas. A large number of colleges and universities have been set up but our young men and women do not get quality education. We have had no famine since Independence though we are still not free from want . Our economy is better today; but 1% of our population has grown richer and holds 58% of the gross wealth of the nation while a large majority with less than 800 Rs per month are not free from hunger and poverty. We are not free of dirt and squalor, nor are we free from mental, moral  and monetary corruption. Our law and order situation is passable, but for women and children, there is no freedom to live without fear and insecurity.  The horrors of partition that posed a threat to communal harmony were replaced in the early years after independence by honouring the age old principles of secularism and pluralism to bind the nation together but seventy one years later the nation is witness to a re run of communal strife and casteist violence. India, racing to adopt modernity is being dragged by two thousand years to follow irrational and superstitious rituals with a past forward movement towards anti-diluvian beliefs. Indian independence that ushered in democracy is now slowly yielding to mobocracy.

There is no denying the intelligence of the Indian mind, but it mainly serves foreign lands where the Indian Diaspora has made a name for itself. Our scientists can successfully send an Indian into space, but for a very large majority of those who stay put on the Indian soil, liberation from clogged minds, from illiteracy, from unemployment, from illness, hunger  and poverty, from violence engendered by casteism and communalism still remains a distant dream.

As I inch my way to four score years, I have just one dream, one song to sing, one wish to be fulfilled, one prayer to make. I dream of a return to those glorious years of nascent freedom when we were all fired by a feverish desire to make “Mere Bharat Mahan”(Make my India Great)’

I have a song  once more to sing with all earnestness- the song that brought tears to the eyes of Pt. Nehru and millions of Indians

Aaaa... Aaaa

aye mere vatan ke logon (Hey People of  my country)

tum khoob laga lo naara (sing the slogans)

ye shubh din hai ham sab ka(Thi s is an auspicious day for us)

lahara lo tiranga pyaara(Let our lovely tricolor (flag) be hoisted

par mat bhoolo seema par(But don't forget that at the border

veeron ne hai praan ganvaaye(Brave soldiers haves sacrificed their lives)

kuch yaad unhein bhi kar lo(Let us remember them)…

I have a wish that we are all liberated from prejudice and hatred, from ignorance and mindlessness, and remember to cultivate  the wisdom of Rabindranath Tagore

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
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

I have a prayer to make, prayer to the world. prayer to humanity , prayer to peace  what Dalai lama says ““Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others; to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.”

 Seventy two going on to seventy three…… Let us hope we write new songs, new prayers, new wishes and new dreamsthat sing of an India that is happy, healthy, prosperous and humane.

MIGA, Indian Version of America's MAGA

                                            MIGA, the Indian version of America’s  MAGA

Recently, I came across three articles related to US. On reflection I felt that they could as well relate to India which is also caught  in the  crosshairs of two opposing ideologies. The Right wing extremism , in all fairness , is to be seen as a slap on Left wing extremism of the last few decades. The missin factor in both cases is moderation. To club all Left wingers as anti national has brought about a deep cleavage among our people and it will be difficult for any future government to heal the division. It is of utmost importance that as a nation, we realize this sooner than later.  

The first of the three articles was one about  Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), an organization to safeguard these two basic principles in governance and instill accountability in the US government. It is a watchdog organization to expose ethical violations and corruption by government officials and institutions. Recently this organization has filed an ethical complaint that Trump administration is consistently failing to follow even the simplest ethical rules. It has pointed out how the administration was using Trump’s campaign slogan MAGA(Make America Great Again) on all official communications and on the social media which is  in contravention of ethical principles, as Trump has become the official candidate for re election  in March 2018 . The use of his campaign slogan to promote Trump’s work by public officials violated the ethical principles ingrained in what is known as the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act had become law in 1939 to “ensure that federal programs are administered in a nonpartisan fashion, to protect federal employees from political coercion in the workplace, and to ensure that federal employees are advanced based on merit and not based on political affiliation.”​​​​. The law ensures that government resources are not used in support or opposition to any political candidate or party.

What we see in US today is not a trickle but an avalanche of violation of the ethical Act. It is equally disturbing to read about the rise of Qanon, known as a conspiracy theory gaining ground. The conspiracy theory centers around an anonymous source, Q, telling  the world about a secret battle being waged by Trump and special counsel Robert Mueller against a pedophile ring filled with celebrities and political elites who have been covertly running the United States government for decades. It is an insidious attack on Hillary Clinton who is accused of running a child sex ring known as the Pizzagate. There is not a shred of evidence to back the claims, for nothing is true. A lot of Trump’s followers(bhakts as we call them in India) have joined the Qanon group as it is intended to provide Trump’s most fervent supporters a way to explain away any scandal or slip-up the president may face.

Let us cut through to India, that is world’s second largest democracy where elections happen regularly and where the electorates are subjected to catchy but vapid slogans and fed on a whole lot of genuine and false attacks on political opponents very similar to Qanon conspiracy theory. But in India we do not have an organization like the CREW as most of the reasoning intelligentsia prefers to sit in the drawing room and speak of doomsday that they see coming, but afraid of sticking their necks out. The one or two who venture to speak out are viciously trolled and abused on the social media and come directly in the line of fire of the government. We also have something similar to MAGA which we can call MIGA(Make India Great Again), a slogan to inspire Indians to contribute to the nation’s development by their support to the ruling party (I am surprised that the present ruling party has not hijacked this acronym in slavish imitation of US). MIGA is a veneer of development over the vituperative attacks on the last seven decades rule mostly by the Pandit parivar and less than a decade by other non Congress Prime Ministers that ironically include five peaceful years of BJP rule under Prime Minister Vajpayee.

Make India Great Again is to bring India back to the halcyon days of Treta yuga of Sri Ramachandra that ended 18 million years ago. The last four years have seen a vicious onslaught on the earlier 67 years with a continuous exhortation to bring back Ram Rajya through  a Congress mukht rule. The Qanon theory has been in full swing these last four years and one fears how much more invasive it will be in the run up to the 2019 elections. But the present situation in India scores over the Qanan theory as it not only attempts to paint the entire opposition as scamsters , it also projects a knight in the shining armour who has arrived true to Nostrodamus’ prediction to cleanse India and take India back to Treta yuga. Adept at making acronyms that US is reputed for, ourMIGA project has been driven on empty slogans so loudly articulated by the ruling party  and by the ‘bhakts’ as Modi supporters call themselves. Our Q theory spares the government in power which defends itself against all ethical violations attributing them to the misdeeds of the previous six decades rule of the Congress.  The deft handling of the vanishing tricks of Mallayyas, Choksis and Modis (PM excepted), the passion for building Sri Ram Temple in Ayodhya, appropriation of Sardar Patel’s legacy( and remaining oblivious to the fact that Sardar Patel had banned RSS and it was only, Pt. Nehru, their sworn aversion, who persuaded Patelji to lift the  ban) and  building his statue that will be the tallest in the world, speaking volubly about triple talak and nikhila while not a squeak on the rapes of young girls and women in shelter homes, professing compassion for Muslim women against all Muslim men, whipping up binary conflicts that would show the opposition as anti national, anti Hindu, anti sanskari(one who preserves the sanctity of Hindu culture), anti tradition, pro Muslim, pro English, pro Western. If Bharat were to become great again, that is possible by rooting out all these anti- ruling party’s professed faith, ideology and prejudices. The third article that has similarity with US is the judgement by US judge Hornsby's ruling, on the question of whether Jews can be defined as a biological race and whether they can be  treated "like a racial or ethnic group." Hornsby says "Modern sociologists and anthropologists, especially with advancements in DNA studies, debate whether Judaism is a people, a religion, or both. There is no doubt, however, that many people have and continue to view being Jewish as a racial identity... Jewish blood" isn't a scientific designation. It's an assertion of racial difference based on prejudice, not fact.”

This is an important insight about racism as all assertions of human racial difference are based in prejudice, not fact. There are no different human races and religion should not be meant as a sign of biological difference. This judgement has relevance for us in India. Those who follow Islam also belong to India. They do not have a separate racial identity. We are on the verge of starting xenophobia just as racism is slowly growing in US and Europe. Hinduism that is founded on pluralism cannot harbour fear of followers of other religion and practice because of a deep rooted prejudice against them. To discriminate fellow citizens on the basis of their different religion, customs and culture is cutting at the root of pluralism and humanism. Pluralism as defined by a Harvard scholar is “ not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity… pluralism is not just tolerance, but the active seeking of understanding across lines of difference…pluralism is not relativism, but the encounter of commitments. The new paradigm of pluralism does not require us to leave our identities and our commitments behind, for pluralism is the encounter of commitments. It means holding our deepest differences, even our religious differences, not in isolation, but in relationship to one another… and lastly  pluralism is based on dialogue. “

Isn’t it time for all thinking, rational and patriotic Indians to organize something on the lines of CREW and spread the message of ethics, pluralism and the importance of dialogue to make MIGA a reality?