1909-2019: Remember ONE NEW PERSON on Independence Day

Friends,

Yesterday was a important day for all of us. Its our Independence Day!
I have a bit of different take for this year's Independence Day.

Let's pledge each one of us to the truth that our Nation attained freedom because of the tireless life of millions of people who fought for our well being, safety, peace and prosperity. And we should not merely pay homage to only one or two who has been branded mistakenly by many in the contemporary world.

So, my humble request to all of you is to remember at least ONE NEW PERSON whom you never heard till now but he or she would have given their life to our beloved country's independence.

Past one month, I have been reading the works of several people who have done great jobs securing the constitutional methods of approach to attaining freedom from evils regimes in British India.

When I say constitution, do not mistaken me only with B R Ambedkar or the galaxy of people in the drafting committee or panels. He did great works no doubt about it but who else have done equally great works is our duty to remember faithfully that they don't merely pass away from our dutiful memory.

The independent India's intellectuals have done great injustice to many great classical liberal thinkers of first half of twentieth century. These classical liberals were the main freedom fighters unbelievably working closely with British Empire before the hegemony of Gandhi and Nehru period.

Indeed, there is quite striking similarity between the current year 2019 and 1909. For first time, the Indian National Congress was split on major reform policies evolved during 1908-1909 into two groups: main leaders were called extremists vs liberals. This split in major reform policies mindset and the ideology still hunts us in today's contemporary public policy making whether it is Congress or BJP or any other family run State level parties.

So, there is a amount of rational way of bringing reforms and policies through constitutional methods instead of protests, fasts, strikes, blacking public vehicles etc. The constitutional approach to protest for policy reforms was adopted by Dadabhai, Ranade, Gokhale, VS Srinivasa Sastri, Ambedkar, etc. The fasts protests etc were adopted by Tilak, Pal, Rai, Gandhi, Nehru, etc. Is these extremists leaders who captured the mainstream political power by ignoring the voices of the liberals scholars.

But the contributions to freedom struggles by Ranade, Gokhale and Sastri, etc. were completely ignored by every section of the society. I find this as ridiculous to continue for several generations.

The entire gamut of public policy making minds in India since the independence are the second rate category with protests, strikes etc without any differences in political parties.

We need to come out of this crude mind set of wild act without any logical reasoning on subjects. There is great amount of tragedies done through the act of strikes, protests, etc. both morally and psychically in the name of one community or segments of population or particular region.

Therefore, do take few minutes to ask your parents, grandparents, friends etc to remember the freedom fighters in your locality and also try to know some of the forgotten great souls of our freedom movements. 

Jai Hind,
Chandra....

Of that Freedom Day

Ramachandra Guha concludes in his article on India's 65th Independence Day that:

• Sixty-five years after the British departed, the Republic of India remains a work in progress. The experiment has clearly not failed; nor has it emphatically succeeded. Home to the most elevating as well as the most depressing aspects of the human experience, it inspires — in this citizen at any rate —pride and embarrassment in equal measure.

Swaminathan Aiyar on Independence Day: Why Partition was a good thing for India

What Congress has done to Indians and India?

Ramachandra Guh explains in the recent interview with Rediff on the emergence of Indian national congress and its use in society.

I have not read the full interview. However, I feel it is important to read this particular interview as it through many lights on the worthy of yesterday congress vis-à-vis today’s congress in India and aboard.

Hope for decades to come

It was Jawaharlal Nehru who said:

• A new star rises, the star of freedom in the East, a new hope comes into being, a vision long cherished materialises. May the star never set and that hope never be betrayed.

And then:

• We rejoice in that freedom, even though clouds surround us, and many of our people are sorrow-stricken and difficult problems encompass us. But freedom brings responsibilities and burdens and we have to face them in the spirit of a free and disciplined people.

Further, what has been achieved then is not to hope down them but create new sins as below:

• The future beckons to us. Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India. To fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease. To build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.

Some says when you smile even in abject poverty it cost nothing and alas it has continued for so long by just hoping when the true individual economic freedom will arrive. So let’s hope the sons of east will one day turn to be centre of the world as a giant!

Bits and piece of the I Day

Neither India nor the world is an orderly place

India’s changing polity, economy and society

Dhiraj Nayyar review of Meghnad Desai’s new book The Rediscovery of India is worth reading.

Mr Nayyar writes:

• Interestingly, Desai starts the book with India’s Vasco Da Gama moment. Fittingly for an economist, he chooses to start that the point when Indian truly began to engage the world beyond just Asia. However, he is careful to point out that this trade wasn’t with India as we know it now, but largely with the coastal areas of South India alone. North India continued to be linked by trade over land to Central Asia. A running theme through his book is that even though the subcontinent had certain strains of common identity through history, it never really had a sense of being one nation or one nation state. So, the Hindu caste system certainly provided one thread.

• The Buddhist Ashoka’s rule may have provided some administrative unity at one point in time as did the Mughal Empire under Aurangzeb much later. But even in the revolt of 1857, which is referred to by some historians as India’s first war of independence, nobody was fighting for the India we got to know in 1947. In fact, in 1857, the revolt was largely confined to what are now the northern states of India all of whom were fighting in the name of a much diminished Mughal emperor. Much of the battle in 1857 was fought by Indian soldiers on either side. The Marathas still harboured ambitions of a greater Maratha empire.

What else would be better? Education, through the Macaulay plan.

Aakar Patel on Independence Day

• The British left in 1947, and they left too soon. We celebrate Independence Day, but another six decades of dependence as Great Britain’s colony would have been good for us. We could have learnt how to run cities. No harm in admitting what is obvious for all to see: We cannot even manage traffic.
• Europeans, of course, told us who and what we were. After 3,000 years of illiteracy, we learnt of the existence of the Indus Valley civilization from John Marshall in 1924. The identity of our greatest emperor, Ashok (died 232 BC), whose lion capital is our emblem, whose wheel is on our flag, was revealed to us by James Prinsep 175 years ago.
• Our Aryan ancestry (or fantasy) was gifted to us by William Jones in 1786, when he reported the link between Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Latin. The barbarism of Muslims at Vijayanagar was revealed by Robert Sewell, when he translated the 16th century work of Fernaos Nunes and Domingos Paes. Between 1879 and 1894, Max Muller translated the entire Upanishad, Vedas and Dhammapada. This helped Vivekanand go lecture the Americans on India’s greatness at Chicago in 1893.
• Growing up in Surat, the only books I had access to were in Andrews Library, built in 1850. This is because Gujaratis, a mercantile people influenced by Jains, have no use for literature. The British stuffed it down our throats like medicine, educating the first reformers, people such as Narmada Shankar who attended the Elphinstone Institute. Shankar compiled Gujarati’s first dictionary in 1873, but the native instinct was strong and he reverted to Vedic tribalism in the last decade of his life.
• That is the cycle South Asians normally follow: illiteracy, awakening through contact with European culture, and then a belief in our superiority.
• But our bombast is groundless. America’s First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Article 19(1)(a) of our Constitution also gave us the absolute right to freedom of speech. Within one year, the government amended that, denying us that freedom—and wisely. That was because we cannot have freedom of speech in a country where you can get killed for what you say. Or start a riot. It was different for Periyar and Manto because they lived under rule of law.

A road trip without a destination!

Shoba Narayan on our 62 Independence Day

• “The thing with freedom is that you have got to know what to do with it. Idiotic allusions to butterflies and rainbows aren’t enough.
• Independence means different things at different ages—crossing the street without holding an adult’s hand; going to a movie with a group of friends without adult supervision; the first school excursion without parents; going out with a forbidden male; leaving home for college; getting your own bank account and income; and onward till death. Every life stage confers with it some more independence—and dependence. Just ask a new parent, tied by umbilical cord to a diaper bag, what freedom is and they will answer—a potty-trained baby. Ask me what freedom is, and I will give you that most clichéd of answers. A road trip without a destination.”