The recent ghastly attacks by Maoists, the tragedy of air crash at Mangalore, unwarranted strike by AI union leaving 30,000 passengers stranded, prevailing political turmoil in the country, religious fanaticism, terrorism, crimes et al shows that India is a bruised and bleeding nation.
Brutal India, bleeding India, burning India, battered India, beleaguered India, bewildered India, faltering India, dropping India, disintegrating India, starving India and dying India.
India today is a battered nation with religion and casteism leading to blood stains all over the place. Bomb blasts have become a child’s toy in the hands of terrorists with our politicians enjoying the game at the altar of the innocent.
India in which forces of chauvinism and fascism have besieged the polity, in which corruption has become a way of life, in which politics has turned into a trade, violence has become the ultimate arbiter of social conflict, law and order has crumbled and the people feel insecure. Today, places of worship are vandalized and public places blasted in broad daylight, in which various religions have turned into battle-fields whose inhabitants are treated as aliens by their own protectors, in which wheels of justice move at snail pace, if at all, in which culture has become the preserve of a few.
Society ignores the basic needs of man in which half the nation sleep with an empty stomach and thousands of villages and millions of people thirst for potable water. Poverty has led to millions of children grow into illiterate, stunned, deformed adults, in which the higher strata form a separate nation, in which sky-scrapers have slums in their shadow, in which religion reduced to rituals known no love or compassion, in which hatred and hostility poison human mind.
Today, equality, justice, solidarity and fraternity exist but in name, in which million of citizens cannot walk with their heads held high, because by accident of birth, in which Presidents and Prime Ministers prostate before living god men, in which science and technology pay tribute to superstition and obscurantism, in which a dream has turned into a nightmare.
A free society has retreated into isolated shells and broken up into mutually hostile groups, where each lives in fear of the other. This is India, today, dominated by hereditary groups in every walk of life, unable to break through the shackles of caste and social disabilities, of religion and religious hostility, of race and racial antagonism of regions and regional disparity. Yet, this is my India, the India of Rama and Buddha, of Guru Nanak and Jesus Christ, of Akbar, Ashoka and Chatrapati Shivaji, of Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, of Jawaharlal Nehru and Jaiprakash Narayan.
My India, whose ideals are peace and non-violence, love and compassion, equality and justice and fraternity, which set out on 15th August 1947, to provide a model for mankind.
If India has to survive as a civilized society, it has to break out of the stagnant pools of hereditary privilege and nourish itself from the inexhaustible spring of the people. In short, democratise itself, decentralise itself, debrahminise itself and decommunalise itself.
We have to cleanse the blood on the streets, extinguish the flames, heal the wounds. We’ll have to vanquish evil, establish peace and justice and embrace all our people irrespective of their caste or creed. Then only we can build a strong India. And loudly claim,” I am proud to be an Indian.”
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