Despotic Peculiarities In The Times Of ‘Independence’
Why am I not able to celebrate this year’s Independence Day the way I have been made to celebrate from my childhood? The answers to this question are many, but a single answer would be “We live in dark times! Freedom and Independence are only for the supporters of one political party or propaganda”.
Looking into a series of events carried out brutally can make one realize that we are a nation that is no longer independent. We are in a stage where an independent idea is no longer an independent idea because it is of an anti-national kind. Because of this very arrival, whoever who has exercised affirmatively with reason ‘the independence of thinking’, is silently shot through a well-abetted mechanism of vigilante attacks. These vigilante attacks are inhuman in nature.
- The killings of Kalburgi, Pansare, Dabholkar, Gauri Lankesh are examples of the same. Silencing the voices that speak the truth is what this fake democracy has executed and this has been carried out through a very well abetted means of a valourisation of the nation as a supreme kind. This results in facts going far away from the limelight of reason and reality, resulting in the very reality being made into fictionalised content in ‘national interest’.
- The removal of Article 370 from the Constitution of India has resulted in a state of fear wherein people who belong to the part of independent India are scared to get out of their own homes. People in Kashmir are under house arrest in the name of national interest. If this is the case in independent India, how independent is India in its actuality?
- People have been killed on the basis of a doubt that they were carrying cow’s meat; they are mercilessly lynched and killed. Irrespective of video footage that shows the atrocities showered by the vigilantes, the court has absolutely paid no heed and has let the people who have killed go ‘free’. A person is killed and the killers walk with heads held high in this independent India. Is that the new form of Independence?
- Adhering to only what a particular group of people propagate and utter forcefully; whatever they force you to say. If not, again one is brutally dealt with. Where did all the independence go?
- Aren’t we in a situation of forced miscalculation of economic figures? This has been done in order to show that the country is independent enough for its growth and development trajectories, while in its actuality ‘The Wealth of a Nation’ rests within a few elite figures resulting in forgetting a lot of the commons. Economic determinism has put our independent nation into a forced dependence.
These listed events are just a few but characteristically they are all events of a larger macro kind. If this is the characteristic of how a nation must be, how independent can a citizen of a country be? When Gandhiji was asked, “What is your idea of India?” He said, “To wipe out the tears of the common man”. Today, India is no longer a land for an independent and a common man. Tears continue to flow and people ensure they flow even more. That’s what independence has done to us.
The idea of independence would be tough for such people to understand because they were nowhere near to the attainment of freedom for India. In other words, they were not part of the freedom struggle.
During the British rule, Veer Savarkar who was put in the Andaman and Nicobar Jail pleaded the Britishers to set him free. He begged, “Therefore if the government in their manifold beneficence and mercy release me, I for one cannot but be the staunchest advocate of constitutional progress and loyalty to the English government which is the foremost condition of that progress.
As long as we are in jails there cannot be real happiness and joy in hundreds and thousands of homes of His Majesty’s loyal subjects in India, for blood is thicker than water; but if we be released the people will instinctively raise a shout of joy and gratitude to the government, who knows how to forgive and correct, more than how to chastise and avenge.
Moreover my conversion to the constitutional line would bring back all those misled young men in India and abroad who were once looking up to me as their guide. I am ready to serve the Government in any capacity they like, for as my conversion is conscientious so I hope my future conduct would be. By keeping me in jail nothing can be got in comparison to what would be otherwise.
The Mighty alone can afford to be merciful and therefore where else can the prodigal son return but to the parental doors of the Government?
This also gave him a tag of ‘Veer’ along with his name. My dear fellow Indians, followers of an ideologue of this kind govern us today. How is it possible to celebrate Independence Day being an Indian?