Slightly independent, definitely not free

By abhay mokashi

The 75^th Independence Day will be celebrated tomorrow in a spectre of the country heading for a disaster on several fronts, given the situation prevailing currently.

Ironically, the nation is now headed by a leader whose party’s ideological ancestral organisations and leaders played no role in the Freedom Movement, rather some of them were with the British to crush the Freedom Movement. Not only that, these leaders and organisations were ardent supporters of the two-nation theory that led to the partition of India and the birth of Pakistan.

The seed of a Hindu Rashtra (a Hindu Nation) is still germinating in the small brains of all those who believe and follow the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ideology; this applies to Prime Minister Narendra Modi too. It is with that thought in mind that Modi announced that beginning this year, the country shall observe Partition Horror Remembrance Day on August 14. By this Modi and his Hindutva colleagues want to sow the seed of Hindutva and anti-Muslim sentiments in the minds of the people of the country.

He is the Prime Minister for the last seven years, so he could have thought of this in the previous years of his being in office. But the need is felt now since, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is losing its popularity with the people having failed on all the promises it made to come to power, along with issues of unemployment and inflation or the way it is ignoring the farmers who have been protesting four seven months now.

One of the reasons that the BJP, which had only two members in the Lok Sabha at one point of time, came to power with the present strength in the House, is because it successfully played the Hindutva card, especially raising the Ayodhya Ram Mandir issue, at a time when V P Singh had announced his intention to implement the Mandal Commission Recommendations on reservations, when he was the Prime Minister.

The saying, strike when the iron is hot, is what the BJP seems to be doing. Its leaders across the country have been delivering hate speeches and fanning anti-Muslim sentiments, with many gullible young and old falling in the trap and the police, under the BJP governments taking no action against such elements. Having laid the ground, Modi took this opportunity to observe Partition Horror Day.

As we celebrate the 75^th Independence Day, the people of India should remember that after the Partition, the Hindu Mahasabha and other organisations, which dreamt of making India a Hindu nation, were badly defeated in the general elections and endorsed Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s concept of a secular nation. This was done by a population, which was not as educated as the population of today, yet they had realised the danger of making India a Hindu country.

While declaring August 14 as Partition Horror Remembrance Day, Modi should also be prepared to observe a Gujarat Horror Remembrance Day, to mark the horrible riots in Gujarat, when he was the Chief Minister.

The inability of the current government in the country to handle various issues is seen on several fronts. A classic case is a government body, approaching a foreign commercial organisation for an alleged crime committed in India. When Rahul Gandhi tweeted the photo of the parents of the girl who was raped in Delhi, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, wrote to Twitter and Instagram to suspend Gandhi’s account. This shows the weakness of the government, in stooping before a foreign commercial organisation, instead of taking legal action against Gandhi in our country under our laws. This is the same government, whose ministers protest when some Indians approach international bodies like United Nations or United Nations Human Rights Commission, over some issues in the country. The Ministers term such individuals anti-national, forgetting that these are international bodies, to which India is a signatory and has vowed to follow the norms set by these organisations.

This is not all, the Prime Minister gave the importance, a country would give to a head of a State or a government, to Facebook Chairperson Mark Zukerberg. Facebook, too is just another commercial organisation.

Modi tried to show to the nation that he is taken China head-on and what his government did was to ban some mobile applications made in China, while our imports from China continued in a big way.

The government opened the flood gates for American companies to invest in India in a big way, make money and send the profits back to the United States.

This shows that the nation is not really independent and when it comes to the freedom, the people of the country are not enjoying the freedom that our great Freedom Fighters had dreamt of. Those who criticise or expose the government are arrested on charges of sedition. Tribals and the poor are being deprived of their land in the name of development.

More and more people are becoming marginalised and a few in the country are accumulating wealth, thanks to the policies of the government.

Millions are denied basic health facilities, decent life and good education. Gender and caste discrimination continues at all levels, including in political parties, whose leaders deliver speeches on ending the discrimination.

A social audit of the situation in the nation shows that we have failed on several fronts in the last 75 years.