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.





Labels:

Comments

  1. Jyotirmoy SarkarMarch 11, 2017 at 11:06 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 12, 2017 at 9:18 AM

      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. sunaina sharmaMarch 13, 2017 at 4:38 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 13, 2017 at 6:23 PM

      Something that contemporary India does not seem to understand.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
13 comments
Read more

Randeep the melody

Many people in this pic have made their presence in this A2Z series A phone call came from an unknown number the other day. “Is it okay to talk to you now, Sir?” The caller asked. The typical start of a conversation by an influencer. “What’s it about?” My usual response looking forward to something like: “I am so-and-so from such-and-such business firm…” And I would cut the call. But there was a surprise this time. “I am Randeep…” I recognised him instantly. His voice rang like a gentle music in my heart. Randeep was a student from the last class 12 batch of Sawan. One of my favourites. He is unforgettable. Both Maggie and I taught him at Sawan where he was a student from class 4 to 12. Nine years in a residential school create deep bonds between people, even between staff and students. Randeep was an ideal student. Good at everything yet very humble and spontaneous. He was a top sportsman and a prefect with eminent leadership. He had certain peculiar problems with academics. Ans
25 comments
Read more

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun
19 comments
Read more

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
37 comments
Read more

Sanjay and other loyalists

AI-generated illustration Some people, especially those in politics, behave as if they are too great to have any contact with the ordinary folk. And they can get on with whoever comes to power on top irrespective of their ideologies and principles. Sanjay was one such person. He occupied some high places in Sawan school [see previous posts, especially P and Q ] merely because he knew how to play his cards more dexterously than ordinary politicians. Whoever came as principal, Sanjay would be there in the elite circle. He seemed to hold most people in contempt. His respect was reserved for the gentry. I belonged to the margins of Sawan society, in Sanjay’s assessment. So we hardly talked to each other. Looking back, I find it quite ludicrous to realise that Sanjay and I lived on the same campus 24x7 for a decade and a half without ever talking to each other except for official purposes.      Towards the end of our coexistence, Sawan had become a veritable hell. Power supply to the
12 comments
Read more