India 2020: A Quest for Identity
It is the year 2020, the year Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam envisioned India as a developed nation where ‘poverty has been totally eradicated, illiteracy removed, crime against women and children is absent, and no one in the society feels alienated’. And just like that all this seems dystopian now.
Suddenly, education, internet, media and communication has left us so shamelessly narrow that we are fighting battles in India’s name that should not have occurred in the first place. So much so, that we were left with no time and resource to work for our goals that we promised.
Today, at 2020, children of India face the crisis of identity. A crisis that carries a profound tragedy. In our desperate attempts to seek identity as her children again, we looked at the easiest and the surface level difference: our pluralism. The nationalism we discovered 70 years ago has been reduced to a banal thought. Today her womb consists of ‘Nationalists’ and ‘Anti-Nationalists’, nothing more and nothing less, where nationalists are everyone who agree and the anti-nationalists are those who dissent. Somehow our pluralism is being stamped on and our ‘Indian-ness’ decided by our ability to keep our opinions and thoughts to ourselves or agree with the ‘Nationalists’ among us.
We discovered ‘Nationalism’ in our struggle for freedom. But not as an emotion you wear on your sleeves but rather a common consciousness that permeated people across religion, culture, caste, gender and language. A remarkable aspect being that, at no point did the harbingers of our freedom lose their identity. It was not a blind, faceless, voiceless army of people, rather an ensemble of identities and opinions. And they won us our freedom not by dreaming about our vanished glories or past greatness but by understanding our differences, accepting our flaws which then led to India’s recovery.
They fought against the British by fighting through our prejudices and our very social fabric first. They worked to remove the stigma of casteism, oppression of women and many other discriminatory social practices that held us back. They built a base for our freedom not by going back to the British free era and remaining as we were before but as an amalgam of the finest of our culture and the external invasions.
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in his book ‘The Discovery of India’ says “A country under foreign domination seeks escape from the present in dreams of a vanished age, and finds consolation in visions of past greatness. That is a foolish and dangerous pastime in which many of us indulge. An equally questionable practice for us in India is to imagine that we are still spiritually great though we have come down in the world in other respects. Spiritual or any other greatness cannot be founded on lack of freedom and opportunity, or on starvation and misery.”
This is indeed the trend we can see among people now, in news, during elections, in speeches and everywhere. The constant reference to past as a place to visit and live. Quoting the past events to justify your actions and statements is not what we need at the moment. We are asked to look back at our foregone times and taught to blame it for our present problems. Somehow all of us can comfortably find a past figure, quotes, events and mistakes to justify our present. It is noteworthy to remind ourselves that we did not continue with our many questionable practices that humiliated certain sections of society simply because it was so for generations and pre-British era was a fruitful one. We have taken from the British what has to be taken: education, scientific enquiry and globalization to build the pedestal on which freedom has risen.
We are made to believe that poverty doesn’t matter, children do not matter, education does not matter, environment does not matter and economy does not matter. We are all panicking to fight against the so called ‘anti-nationalists’ wearing some perceived sense of patriotism on our sleeves. All the education and youth in us wasted away in dwelling in past glories, desperate to seek homogeneity as a basis for nationalistic feelings and pluralism as a reason for all crisis we face as a nation.
Picking moments in history selectively to justify your reasons is not why we learn history. It is not some learning of facts to throw at the other’s face when you desire or when you run out of logical, rational reasoning, neither is it a tab to keep for revenge.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” says Mark Twain.
We remember the pain of partition in 1947. We remember the riots of 1984. We remember the events that led to the exodus of Kashmiri Hindus. We remember the 2002 inter-communal violence in Gujarat. We remember what happens when we let a mono-thought identity define us. We remember. And that is why we look at the past, and that is precisely why we must learn it. It is because of what can happen and what has happened that we must act to correct it, to wash the stain through justice. And, quite often we forget that justice is not revenge.
Nationalism is not forcing to say a particular slogan, Nationalism is not agreeing to everything, Nationalism is not correcting history by letting things happen because it’s happening to the other side now. It is in acceptance of the differences, it is in agreeing to disagree. Nationalism is in looking beyond to a wider social aim.
I hope, we can find in our thoughts and aspect, a vision, that rekindles our pluralism, our brotherhood and a resurgence in the conscience, of our shared history, culture and beginnings.
*An extract of this article was published in ‘The Quint’ in its ‘Letter to India’ series
