‘We have to see ourselves for who we really are’
We? Does not my very use of the word say it all? Are we, the people of India so integrated as to give me the right to use the collective ‘we’? By ‘we’, do I not mean me and my kind? For us ‘we’, Independence Day is just an annual ritual, a holiday. We wake up that morning, change our FB status, tweet our tweets, listen to the prime minister’s exhortations from the Red Fort, watch Ben Kingsley play Mahatma Gandhi on the telly, and the next day, it’s business as usual. A complete farce, hogwash, that is what 15th of August has been for long.
For those who have benefited from this nation, it feels good to be proud. It’s so easy, we are convinced that it is only our hard work and merit that has got us success. In celebrating the nation, we are patting ourselves on our backs. I am a member of this team, self-satisfied, self-centred and fundamentally self-seeking.
What does it mean to be independent and free? Independence is a collective experience; it is meant to be
“THE LOUDEST OF OUR OWN SWADESHI BULLIES HAVE REPLACED THE RULING FIRANGI”
about the others and not me, and imbued with the spirit of empathy, not condescension. Our freedom fighters fought realising the plight of the poorest of the poor and, irrespective of their own social addresses, demanded this right for us in unison. But we have lost the ability to see, feel and hear people and the loudest of our own swadeshi bullies have replaced the ruling firangi.
And whenever ‘we’ refer to the poor, oppressed and marginalised, we do so not with concern but pity. I know this may be well intentioned, but it helps us dodge the duty of thought. We need to introspect and accept that we are inherently privileged through centuries of access and that caste supremacy is ingrained in our living. And we must recognise ‘their’ right to everything that we have explicitly and implicitly kept away from them. Do not think that by educating your house help’s children or giving them a job at your company, you have purged yourself of caste bias. You have not. Unfortunately, today caste camouflages itself in insidious ways and we think we can do away with it by calling it class; an ingenious but dangerous argument.
Even if significant change in our society is a long way off, at least today caste is discussed with vigour. But there is another self-deceivingly self-centredness in us that needs tackling with equal force—the first vertical division in the social scale—sexism and misogyny. Sexism feeds and incubates racial, caste and religious segregations. It is the man who has manipulated all these spaces. Therefore, it is implied that any change in society must begin with gender equality; equality not just in functional terms, but in being.
And let us face this fair and square: there is among the minority communities of India—Muslims, in particular—a feeling of a growing alienation. Are India’s Hindus now being persuaded that India’s Muslims are here by the Hindus’ leave, their permission, their large-heartedness? The powerful brokers, people like me, are we really independent? We are members of a gang, and through generations we have convinced ourselves, with help from our leaders, that given a little philanthropy, a touch of egalitarianism, we are good Indians. Anyone who joins our organisation makes sure that he or she becomes like us. So we have been adding to our numbers and this we term as progress. Independence Day has no meaning unless we see ourselves for who we really are. From that experience will emerge hope. There may just be a time when every day is Freedom Day for every inhabitant of this land.