Towards Freedom

Towards Freedom

- Srinath Jagannathan

The dawn of an anniversary allows us to bring out the dictionary of introspection. As the 58th anniversary celebrations of the epoch of our independence approach, we must ponder upon what the acquisition of sovereignty must mean to us as a nation. In 1947, all of us would have liked to imagine that sovereignty was a guarantee for economic prosperity shrouded in the faldage of social equity and the irreversible grant of freedom and liberties to all citizens. Yet the departure of the British introduced dual sovereignties in the sub-continent. After a few years, triple sovereignties emerged. Thus the fact cannot be ignored, that a vast section of people felt their interests could not be protected under the aegis of a single sovereignty. Hence, the necessity for the disaggregation of sovereignties. The fission of sovereignties is an event more violent than the fission of the atom. Similarly, the fusion of sovereignties is an equally dangerous proposition, for it is inevitably predicated upon the failure of a sovereignty to guarantee a decent quorum of the inalienable human rights as derived from the Declaration of Independence of 1776.

The RSS emerged from a sense of disappointment with Muslim nationalist thought. It was founded on the celebration of the great human virtues that it thought Hinduism to embody. It could not fathom how a people could regard these virtues as merely a hypocritical veil from beneath which would emerge a majoritarian brutality merely safeguarding sectarian interests. It takes but a few thoughtless words to transform disappointment into anger and resentment. Resentment, when enveloped by a panoply of distorted ideological interpretations of the history of medieval Muslim suzerainty in India, soon spawns a culture of violence built upon the rhetoric of propaganda. Propaganda silences argument. But when arguments acquire the prestige of spiritual elevation and become a perpetual thorn in the flesh of propaganda, they can no longer be silenced. Therefore, the ultimate brahmastra - assassination.

Thus, Hindu and Muslim communalists emerged on the fringes as the twin ends of a tropical cyclone engaged in the whirling dance of death and destruction in the journey towards freedom. It is the people who are caught in the middle of a cyclone who suffer the most.

This week, Pakistan played an influential role in foiling the beginnings of a terrorist conspiracy in US and UK. Why doesn't Pakistan play a similar role in curbing terror in India? We may search for ideological answers based on the past, but this ideological matrix can have no place in the act of policy formulation. Policy cannot ignore realities. India is not a military, economic and political power in the form of US and UK. We can offer nothing to Pakistan in the form of a quid pro quo for curbing terror that the US and UK can offer. We cannot offer aid, we cannot offer institutional absorption for the elite, and we cannot offer international prestige by association. But what has prevented India from becoming a power in the form of US and UK? Certainly not the lack of sovereignty, the 58th