On the night of 14-15 August 1947, Mr Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, delivered his now famous and oft-quoted tryst with destiny speech to the Constituent Assembly in an address telecast over the radio. The speech, a carefully crafted masterpiece, was a defining moment in India’s history, holding great promise for the future. “A moment comes”, he said, “which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new — when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance”.
It was an interesting play of words: “a soul long suppressed.” The meaning of the phrase was never amplified. In the decades following this powerful oratory, there was no mention of what the elected government proposed to do to unshackle the hearts and minds of the people and enable their souls to find utterance. There was little clarity also on what exactly was suppressed that Mr Nehru referred to. Was it just political suppression and economic subjugation that India needed to be freed from? Or was it something much deeper?
Referred to in our ancient texts as Bharat, the subjugation of this land was far more than political and economic subjugation. It was a brutal assault on our culture, beliefs, spirit, and our very way of life. It was a subjugation of our scriptures, our sacred spaces and our core identity.So what did India’s rulers do about setting right this very grievous wrong? A reasoned assessment of the actions of various governments in the first few decades after independence shows that far from doing anything to address historical wrongs, they set about further exacerbating old wounds.
Using the legislative route, the Central Government passed The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991—a legislation that sought to maintain the status quo of the religious character of any place of worship as it existed on 15 August 1947. The Act was merely to stay action on claims by the Hindu community to restore sacred sites of many Hindu temples, such as the Krishna Janmabhoomi Mandir at Mathura,—a place revered by Hindus who believe that this was the birthplace of Sri Krishna. The Mandir was demolished by Aurangzeb in 1670 CE, and a mosque was constructed atop its ruins—a fact supported by the official court bulletin of February 1670. This is just one example. Many others abound, the more prominent being the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi, constructed over a destroyed Hindu Mandir, as evidenced by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) findings.
The reclamation of all Hindu sacred spaces should have taken place soon after independence, for that would have given utterance to the soul of India, long suppressed. But that did not happen. A false sense of what it means to be secular kept all such issues at abeyance. The grievous hurt extended to other matters, too. The state control of important Hindu mandirs and pilgrimage places was legislated, but no similar legislation for mosques, churches or Gurudwaras was ordained. To exacerbate matters, the Waqf Boards set up in 1913 to manage waqf properties were, post-independence, given extraordinary powers to the extent that they became unanswerable to any authority. This led to piquant situations where these boards started usurping private and government land. Why such powers were given had much to do with vote-bank politics, wherein certain political parties sought to consolidate the Muslim vote in their favour. In the process, it created schisms in the very fabric of India and resulted in the rise of communal politics in the country.
In the field of education, rather than creating a conducive education environment which drew inspiration from India’s past, to preserve the soul of India, we outsourced education to the left-leaning cabal. As stated by Sanjeev Sanyal, “The Left dominance over the intellectual establishment has its roots in the systematic ‘ethnic cleansing’ of all non-Left thinkers since the 1950s”. As a result, “there were no non-Left academics remaining in the social sciences field in India by the early 1990s”.[1]
These self-declared intellectuals trampled over Bharat’s traditional and progressive cultural practices, jettisoning our rich cultural values. Speaking at a book discussion on the unveiling of the book The Indian Conservative by Jaithirth Rao, Dr Abhay Firodia, President Force Motors, made the point that the history taught today is “malicious, synthetic and fabricated, which is trying to break our affinity to our land, destroy our confidence and make us hate ourselves”.[2] Many intellectuals have expressed similar sentiments over the years, but only now do we see some signs of change, as indicated in the new education policy which has been promulgated.
On the economic front, for many years, India’s intellectual establishment remained wedded to the idea that Nehru’s socialist economic model was the right course for India to emerge as a developed country. All that was required was proper implementation. This, again, was a product of leftist thought and had no rationale or model to back it. India’s stagnation, even three decades after pursuing the Nehruvian dream, was not attributed to the failure of socialism but, quite perversely, to the majority community of India. It was an economist of the establishment, Raj Krishna, who derisively coined the term “Hindu rate of growth”[3] to show India’s failure to the world as one resulting from its people who professed the Hindu faith. This was insulting. We do not see the term Muslim rate of growth being applied to countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somalia and Afghanistan. Nehru steered India through difficult times, but his economic and social models were not recipes for success. One of the reasons was that they were an artificial import, not suited to the genius and culture of Bharat.
In another 23 years, India will commemorate a century of freedom. However, steps to free the long-suppressed soul of India began in a real sense only in 2014 when the people of India gave a thumping mandate to the BJP-led NDA government and repeated the same in 2019. Over the last decade, we have seen the construction of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A, the abolition of instant Triple Talaq, the introduction of the New Education Policy, and various such initiatives in multiple fields. In the economic sphere, we are now the fifth largest economy in the world and will soon become the third largest; the GDP and the per capita income are on the rise, we have successfully weathered the downturn caused by the Chinese virus, and despite the conflicts prevailing in India’s neighbourhood, we are the fastest growing large economy in the world. Today, there is a renewed sense of pride in our civilisational heritage and ethos, and the world looks up to India.
India’s culture, cuisine, and ethos are respected worldwide. Yoga, India’s gift to the world, has become a household word. This is no small achievement.
However, many challenges still need to be addressed and overcome. Despite a reduced mandate in the 2024 elections, the coming decade promises to be exciting, purposeful, and challenging. But the difference now is that we have finally started shedding the hesitancies of the past and reclaiming our lost heritage. The soul of Bharat has found utterance. Bharat is in churn, but the churn reflects the ‘SamudraManthana’ or ‘churning of the ocean’as depicted in the Vishnu Purana, Bhagavata Purana, and the Mahabharata. It is truly a time for hope and rejuvenation.
Author Brief Bio: Maj. Gen. Dhruv C. Katoch is Editor, India Foundation Journal and Director, India Foundation
[1] http://www.sanjeevsanyal.com/home/article_detail/86
[2] https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/indian-conservatism-has-not-received-academic-recognition-jaitirth-rao/story-NCBSGMyxska32KenM3TeyJ.html
[3] https://www.livemint.com/economy/the-history-behind-hindu-rate-of-growth-in-charts-11678370005198.html
