M D Nalapat
The many obstacles to freedom of speech and choice in India need to be dismantled.
Once the BJP
secured a majority in the Lok Sabha on 16 May 2014, several thinkers
from what gets described as the “saffron camp”, and who earlier had been
dismissed as lightweights, found a new prominence. For decades, they
had pointed out errors in the history books of the post-1947 period,
which literature in essence is similar to those used during the period
when it was the Union Jack and not the Tricolour flying above the top of
Raisina Hill. However, they then exhibited the same error of seeing
certain other historical events through rose-coloured lenses. For the
“saffron” scholars, the period before the Muslim invasions and European
conquests of the Indian subcontinent were a golden age. They were not.
Several of the rulers of that period were venal, repressive and
incompetent, while many had social views as regressive as those earlier
held by Manu, whose edicts about women in particular were later adopted
wholesale by Abdul Wahhab in his wanderings within the Nejd desert of
what is now Saudi Arabia. More than 85% of the population of the land of
our ancestors was disallowed by considerations of “caste by birth” from
taking up arms to defend their territories against invasions. Once an
individual’s caste got determined by birth rather than by occupation,
the ossification of society commenced, rendering it easy prey for
invaders from Persia, Central Asia, Afghanistan and the Arab world, not
to mention later conquests by the European powers. If pre-Mughal India
had been the paradise of justice and plenty described by those who
simultaneously (and correctly) point to the atrocities committed on the
people during the past millennium by outside invaders, it would never
have collapsed to armies that were, culturally and materially,
substantially below the levels reached by their domestic conquests.
After freedom was secured in 1947 (after
the British lost confidence during 1944-46 that the “native military”
would for much longer go against their own people to protect the
colonial ruler), the Union of India was a shadow of what British India
had been in terms of territory and influence. From the Arabian Sea to
the Himalayas to the Arakan, the primacy of Delhi shrank and rapidly
disappeared once those who had spent years leading the fight for
Independence from British-era jails took charge. A factual history of
the past millennium needs to replace the nursery tales created by
Nehruvian historians, but a similar candour is needed in examining the
faults in the society and politics of what came before, during what the
nursery tales (this time of the “Right”) term as India’s Golden Age.
Wahhabis regard as blasphemy any
deviation from the line taken by them on events and personalities, and
so do those who have driven away the writings of A.K. Ramanujan from
college shelves because he gave a version of the Ramayana
different from that favoured by self-appointed “protectors” of the name
of Lord Ram. By such actions, they are belittling the glory of one of
the greatest figures in history, a life that ought to be taught in every
school in India for the insights it offers. The historical reputation
of Lord Ram does not need such epigones as its champions. Lord Ram’s
glory can easily withstand critical assessments. Behaving the way
Wahhabis do in seeking to stop differing interpretations of Lord Ram
will only recreate the social faultiness which a millennium ago caused
our land to succumb to invasions. Rather than strengthen it so as to
enable India to take its place as the Third Superpower, after China and
the US, censorship and intolerance to opposing views and lifestyles will
weaken India. The only way policymakers in our country can ensure
employment and income levels sufficient to move the economy into the
Middle Income range within a generation is to generate a manifold
expansion in the Knowledge Economy. This requires the abolition of the
constrictive framework that has been created for education in India. But
this would not be enough. It was its relatively liberal traditions that
led to the success of Bangalore as an Information Technology hub, just
as it is the relaxed societal atmosphere at NRI-filled Silicon Valley
which helps ensure its dominance in the global Knowledge Economy table.
Such should be the ruling ethos and ecosystem in India.
Rather than flex their muscles against
helpless individuals, such imitators of Wahhabi mores need to
concentrate on the forces that seek to break (or at the least severely
weaken) India. Among them are groups which work through agitations and
propaganda to prevent the mining of coal, iron ore, copper, uranium and
rare earths within the country. It is very likely that the copper plant
in Tuticorin that got shut down after protests was operating in a manner
that added substantially to pollution. If so, the state government
ought to have temporarily taken over the company and ensured cleaner
processing of raw material rather than allowing it to be closed. Its
shutdown means more copper has to be imported from outside the country,
the way coal is in a country nature has endowed immense resources of the
substance with. Madushree Mukherjee has written a book (Churchill’s Secret War)
that ought to be taught in classes across the country rather than the
fiction spewed out by Nehruvian historians. She shows how British rule
changed India from a manufacturing hub into merely a producer of raw
materials. Several shadowy groups operating in India seek with
anti-industry rhetoric and activity to prevent even raw materials from
being extracted in this country, much less manufacture.
Whether it be the effect on press freedom
of the ease with which criminal defamation cases can get filed or the
manner in which Saudi-model crackdowns occur on those adopting a diet or
lifestyle different from those choices favoured by zealots, there are
still too many obstacles to freedom of speech and choice in India. These
need to be dismantled, not simply because that is the moral thing to
do, but because such is the only way individual initiative can flourish
in India the way it does in the countries to which Indians are forced to
flee to ensure more productive lives than India’s colonial governance
system makes possible.
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