DNA Edit: India eternal

On the eve of India’s 69th Republic Day, India looks gamely into its future, fully conscious that the fetters of long-ago have no place in the future. Perhaps, on such a momentous occasion there is none better than the President of the Republic himself to lay down a road map for us. Addressing the nation, President Ram Nath Kovind made a veiled reference to the disputatious and ideologically confrontational times that we live in. These squabbles are becoming far too abundant and much too strenuous on the all-embracing fabric of our societies. These cracks have been surfacing essentially because new banks of misinformation and manipulated histories have hauled us far away from our cherished customs of healthy debate and syncretism.

A veritable industry of offence thrives and Indians have unmoored themselves from the shores of reason and constitutionality. The path to sanity lies, as President Kovind puts it, though “civic-minded neighbourhoods”.  Only a people capable of respecting the boundaries between themselves and their neighbour can learn to live peacefully. From this step comes the maturity to regard mores and morals of others with a dispassionate detachment.

However, in today’s India, we have become far too invested in reading evil designs in places where there are none; in demonising those not of our kith and kin whose dreams and desires are no different than ours; in creating a homogenous society where divergent viewpoints are silenced. This is not the society that the martyrs of this nation and the framers of the Constitution worked for. Their India – an India of liberty, equality, fraternity – and their imagination of India still survives, albeit a bit muddied now. It is incumbent on all of us to recommit ourselves to the cause of this eternal nation, to help it realise, via our individual capacities, the heights of its own greatness.

Historically, India is a land of numerous injustices. Conflicts of caste, class, culture, customs, cuisine and countless other cleavages have existed for long in India. It is only the young or the truly naive who brave staring into the heart of the abyss. Many, if not most, look away. They are not wrong to do so. Violence is woven deeply, and at once casually, into the everyday life of India. The grammar of our lives is pockmarked by wounds- some that have scabbed over and some that are still raw- that will never be forgotten.

In the memory of that wound; in the pain of that injury; in the shock of that attack lies the common thread that binds us all: That, we as a people, are not destroyed. That, we as a people, are not defeated. Broken, we might be but not beyond the sure and certain hope of deliverance. No nation on this earth worthy of its glory has a history where people have not been wronged, persecuted or tyrannised. But a nation is as much its present and its future as much as it is the past. A preponderant section of India’s population today is under the age of 35. Sooner rather than later, the world will register our presence.