This land is our land: We cannot blame‘foreigners’ 

Independence marked deliverance from foreign rule. Deliverance from foreign rulers who ruthlessly exploited local resources and the local population. Independence meant self-rule by Indians who became free to shape their own destiny and shape India into a more equitable social, economic and judicial order in which independent institutions were designed to safeguard individual freedoms.

Seventy-three years later, we have nobody to blame but ourselves if we have fallen short of those expectations. For me this Independence Day marks how sharply we have deviated from the ideal. Personal charisma has fuelled leadership in political democracies since ancient Greece. But from the days of Julius Caesar personality cults unchecked by countervailing forces have generally been disastrous. In India also we find Prime Minister Modi’s popular appeal and magnetism is accompanied by a leadership style that is highly authoritarian, undemocratic and dismissive of contrarian opinions and ideas.

His self-serving personality cult is undermining a healthy and coherent national discourse, encouraging hysterical political campaigns while ignoring issues critical to the nation (unemployment and the economy, to cite just two). You only need to listen to the statements emanating from the PMO on the recent Chinese encroachments to realise how bluster and outright obfuscation are being used to hide strategic failure. In a democratic society, strong and independent institutions are the best guarantors of individual’s liberties. An across the board assault on institutions – economic, educational, judicial, media or social- has unfortunately been the BJP’s biggest ‘gift’ to the nation.

Our education system is being poisoned by antagonistic ideologies and revisionist interpretations of history, while premier institutions are being systematically targeted to change their democratic and secular ethos. The capture of media institutions, those that did not willingly align themselves to cheaply bought TRPs, is self-evident. Appointment of ‘right thinking’ mediocrities in key positions and bodies has become a norm. No wonder that even the head of that most secular and non-political of organisations, the Indian Army, now finds it in him to start giving borderline political statements!

The notion of ‘Independence’ becomes a fuzzy fantasy when the state itself suppresses rightful dissent. In Lucknow, a retired 80-year old IPS officer and human rights defender has been charged with rioting (he already was under house arrest at the time) and his house is being attached by the UP government. Anti-CAA protesters’ photos and home addresses were put up on billboards by the state- in a blatant violation of their civil rights and incitement to the mob to physically harm them.

The one place where the current government has achieved ‘success’ is its seeming ‘Independence’ from transformative ideas to take us forward as a nation. From drafting a Constitution that was hailed across the world to building ‘temples’ of modern India, implementing an IT revolution or throwing open our economy through liberalization in the early nineties, modern India was built on big, transformative ideas, conceived and executed at scale. So far, however, the only big ideas that the BJP has revealed have been grandly announced, poorly conceived and poorly executed – demonetisation, GST, Swachh Bharat, Make in India and the post-pandemic lockdown to name a few. This bears thinking about.

This Independence Day I will re-read Tagore’s poem “Where the Mind Is Without Fear”, if only to remind myself how far we have travelled and what today we are not. As a nation and as a society.

(The author is member National Executive Committee, Social Media Department, Indian National Congress and Former Head Of News Partnerships, Facebook, India)