60 years of Independence

We are celebrating 60 years of freedom; freedom from the British rule & I have finished my patriotic duty in the only ways I could, by wishing my friends through SMS and Orkut scraps and have even changed my display picture to a photo of NASDAQ draped in the Indian tri-colour. I have always regretted the fact that I was not born decades earlier when I could have contributed my mite for my country’s struggle for freedom, maybe by pulling down the Union Jack from the local government office and getting a few lathi blows in the bargain. I’ve grown up idolising the people who really fought for our freedom, not a Gandhi or a Nehru, but those nameless thousands of common people, a vast majority of them illiterate, who followed Gandhi as he walked for 23 days from Sabarmathi Ashram to the coastal village of Dandi to make salt leaving behind their daily routines, who selflessly picketed the local British government centres taking in the lathi blows, who gave up their present-days for India’s future, who spent years locked away in prisons so that we can call ourselves a free nation today and who, after India got a hard-fought freedom, rather gullibly but optimistically sided themselves with the Nehruvian class of socialism only to be cruelly betrayed.

Sixty years later on, Nehru’s mistakes have ensured that one tyrannical administration has been replaced by another that is also a highly dysfunctional one. Today, corruption and nepotism are the norms rather than the exceptions. A woman as India’s president, a woman as the leader of the country’s largest political party and a woman as the chief minister of India’s largest populous state have done nothing to further the cause of women’s rights when we have one of the worst rural health-care systems in the world and one of the highest rates of infant mortality. “Politics” today, is a dirty word, more obnoxious than any four-letter word and the “politician” is someone who ranks lower than a tapeworm in terms of people’s respect. Scams after scams have been unearthed and the guilty rich and powerful have exploited every existent and non-existent loophole in the law to avoid being prosecuted. But, today it is the same people, albeit a bit more literate, who are taking up the cudgels against another regime not much different from the one they fought sixty years ago. Whether it was a candle-light vigil to get justice in the Jessica Lal case, or the sting operations of a hyper-active media or the great efforts to get the right-to-information act passed in the parliament, I know that the persons who were my childhood heroes still live on in different avatars and as long as they live on, we still have the upper hand in this fresh freedom struggle and this time I can finally be a part of it.