Photo by Prakhar Sharma on Unsplash
This year on 15 August 2024 India is celebrating her 78th independence day. Being the proud sons of the soil, we celebrate this day with utmost fervour, enthusiasm and pride in order to commemorate our freedom from the shackles of subjugation and slavery of the British Raj. During the 200 years of our freedom struggle right from the battle of Plassey in 1757, we learnt many important lessons which portrayed India into a mighty nation and the largest democracy in the world. During this cumbersome but “blessing in disguise” type of journey we came to know that our past was ridden with many political, socio-economic and religious evils which modern India has succeeded in getting rid of up to a substantial extent. However, the question that we need to ask ourselves at the dawn of the 78th year of our independence is that, ‘Are we really free, happy and independent or still enslaved by any socio-economic, religious and/or psychological blots even after 78 years of our independence’.
Once we analyse this premise in the courts of our respective consciences, we get only one disposition in bold terms which says “We are still enslaved” but this time not by any foreign powers but by our own thoughts, actions and reactions. Who is responsible for this is a million-dollar question that needs to be understood at the outset.
From a sociocultural perspective, we witness some change but more continuity at present in and around our society that is fragmented on the basis of caste, colour, language as well as place of birth. Most often, we keep differentiating between rural and urban (in developmental aspects), north Indian and south Indian (in food habits and dressing sense), upper and lower castes (in politics) and fair-skinned and dark-skinned (in matrimonial relations, social bonds and employment opportunities). When these differences are coalesced into discriminations, things take an uglier turn.
From economic, religious and psychological perspectives, we again fail in upholding freedom of thought. Haves and have-nots are not treated at par in our economic setup. Some religions reap ripe fruits while others are made to pass the litmus test to justify even the basics of their faith. Likewise, some ideologies are dominantly thrust upon people, while others lack any existential base.
Even though we attained innumerable milestones of developmental progression, we are still witnessing waves of intolerance, insecurity, inflation and unemployment in our economy. In today's Independent India, the aggression of guests as well as anchors on television shows and news channels in addition to the mudslinging on one another in our temples of democracy has become a norm. We are far away from protecting our women from molestation, gang rapes and eve-teasing on streets and work places. We are unable to develop an atmosphere of safety and security for them in our own society which is but an epitome of broken marriages, frequent divorces, delinquencies, drug addictions and crimes like drinking, gambling and human trafficking.
We have progressed in becoming intolerant towards other faiths. If a Hindu girl wishes to marry a boy from other faiths, we call it love jihad. We aren’t ready to embrace any religious conversions. We don’t raise any voices against honour killings and “Khap panchayats” at all.
Our families, schools and colleges as well as other institutions clearly indicate that we failed to become good parents, effective teachers, philanthropic doctors, visionary bureaucrats and politicians as well as hardworking farmers and laborious industrialists. Our parenting and teaching are defective and ineffective, our doctors are not kind enough towards their patients, our bureaucrats and politicians are myopic without any clear vision, and our farmers and industrialists aren’t productive and laborious.
In our future, we are producing a generation of self-centred children who lack any moral values and ethical standards and are only occupied with their own lives. We promote vulgarity, nudity, materialistic outlook, individualism, hacking, aggression, impatience, vice and non-cooperative tendencies in our young generations as a result of which we spoil not only our families and communities but the nation as a whole. This reduces any future potential of growth and makes a progressive and healthy nation abruptly ill.
Here, we must realise that our forefathers didn’t dream of giving us this type of independence which will make us independent but intolerant, self-centred, aggressive, myopic, corrupt and discriminatory so much so that we don’t want to come out of our comfort zones even when a substantial proportion of our countrymen live below the poverty line in the slums and squatters in the length and breadth of this nation.
The need of the hour is to stand firmly and unite against all such odds and fissiparous tendencies which have deeply corrupted our society, shut off our polity, slowed down our economy and made its institutions and systems as well as men and material dysfunctional and unproductive. This is the real tribute to our nation on the eve of our independence.