The Indian reality is both transparent and opaque simultaneously. What is visible is as much a part of the truth as what remains unseen. Over the years the Indian leadership, and the educated Indian, have deliberately projected and embellished an image about Indians they know to be untrue, and have willfully encouraged the well-meaning but credulous foreign observer (and even more the foreign scholar) to accept it. What is worse, they have fallen in love with that image, and can no longer accept it as untrue.
India has been a parliamentary democracy since independence in 1947; therefore Indians are undeniably democratic by temperament. Several important religions were born and flourish in India; therefore Indians are essentially spiritual in their outlook. People of different faiths have found a home in India; therefore Indians are basically tolerant by nature. Gandhi defeated the British by relying on ahimsa, his doctrine of non-violence; therefore Indians are peaceful and non-violent in temperament. Hindu philosophy considers the real world as transient and ephemeral; therefore, Hindus are “otherworldly” and unmaterialistic in their thinking.
To demolish the untruths of the past requires courage, because it is tantamount to questioning the dogmas of the modern state. Why do Indians prostrate themselves so abjectly before the rich and the mighty, and why are they so indifferent to the suffering of the weak and the poor? Why has a nation, which had Gandhi as its towering role model of rectitude, become so unbelievably corrupt so quickly? The Hindus practised untouchability against the largest numbers of their own faith. Do they then really have a claim to being called tolerant? If not, why has secularism survived in India? Can a people, whose educated members beat up a domestic servant to near death, blind undertrials to extract a confession, or burn wives for dowry, be non-violent in their make-up? If not, why did Gandhi's strategy of ahimsa succeed?
1 comment:
Nice thoughts:)
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