India is in the grip of the great churn once again. The other churn I refer to is the one of the freedom struggle. It helped to throw up a leadership which spearheaded the fight for independence of the country from the foreign yoke.
At the core of this successful resurgence of the country lay the spiritual revivalist efforts of great sons of the soil such as the ever-youthful Swami Vivekananda and the seer of a new Dawn, Sri Aurobindo. The spiritual revival of the country threw up enlightened individuals who made stellar contributions to the various aspects of our national life to quicken it once more with the urge to break free from the shackles of a moribund past. As a result, the political life of the nation witnessed the emergence of stalwarts like Gandhi, Nehru, Gokhale, Tilak, Sardar Patel, and scores of individuals, all fired with one zeal, the passion to liberate India. All resonated to one mantra, the mantra of Indian nationalism.
On account of the spiritual underpinning of this struggle, Indian nationalism never turned jingoistic. It respected the right of the others to co-exist with the emergent nation-state of free India. It did not even harbour any ill will or revenge against the invaders of the past or the imperialists. Rightly so, it adopted the path of peaceful struggle and partnership with the then imperialist power.
Within the nation, it steered clear of any petty communal agenda by adopting secularism as a creed, though the independence of the country was marred with the emergence of the communal virus, that gave birth to the ever-unstable state of Pakistan. The all-universal and eternal spiritual core of India prevented the Indian leadership, though largely Hindu, from espousing the thesis of the two-nation theory by rejecting the thought of turning the nation into a 'Hindu' state as opposed to the Islamic Pakistan. Such a course would have run counter to the eternal and universal message of the Veda that speaks of the transcendental and the immanent Divine as the basis of this great Creation in all its infinite variety of colours, forms and creeds, suiting each community and individual. Besides, we need to remember anything engendered in hatred also succumbs to the apoptosis of hatred. The instability of Pakistan as a nation state is a case in point.
The fervour of freedom however subsided once it was gained. In the new found freedom of choice open to all individuals in the nation, at least at the notional level, freedom soon turned into license for the rich and the powerful to rape and plunder the nation and the vast hapless majority of its rich resources. The brazen display of power that the media has unmasked in recent times has proved right what the Mahatma said long ago that there is enough in Nature for everyone's need, but not enough for one man's greed. And here we have had not one but a sizable number of power-hungry and money-mongering individuals aggrandizing their personal wealth by looting the Kuber ka Khazana, the national exchequer and the national resources, mindless of the fact that you cannot hew the branch on which you are perched.
Yet, this unabashed display of power and pelf is not unlike the poison that the sagar manthan of yore produced before the amrita of peace and resurgence could emerge. So, my appeal to all pessimists, please have patience. The histories of nations do not get fashioned at a pace at which individual lives get transformed. I foresee the bottoming out of the trough of decay and decadence in the country's culture at all levels, individual as well as 'communal' (in the sense of the community), and the rise of the curve of integrity and harmony, and thus, progress.
We must remember the lotus blooms in the muddy pool and the lily blooms on a dung-hill. The seeds of this resurgence are visible not just in the emergence of an activist civil society but also the assertion of right thinking individuals in the corridors of power.
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