Midnight, 15th August 1947, the world awoke to the voice of independent India, after the very long freedom struggle and for the very first time. India spoke of her dreams and aspirations at the same time introducing herself with her glorious past albeit horrible present. “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history when we step out from the old to the new when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”, Jawaharlal Nehru declared triumphantly!
Indian civilization is perhaps as old as human civilization itself. She had been the witness of her flourishing diversity and cherished geography. She kept her heart open for the entirety of humanity. From the beginning of civilization to the arrival and invasions of the Aryan to the eventual colonizing by the British, she rejoiced in her philosophical richness, diverse culture, her children’s prosperity even though her heart was beaking by the looting and atrocities of the emperors and the British and yet after enduring and suffering all these, she continued to remain firm and indestructible. Her richness of diversity is still strong. As had been said by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, “by strong but invisible threads, about her there is the elusive quality of a legend of long ago, some enchantment seems to have held her mind. She is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and pervasive.”
As the world is moving towards identity politics, lots of people are asking why India be an exception? Well, I and many people who share the same idea of India which is also the very idea on which India was founded, believe firmly that India must prove herself to be an exception in the world’s political arena.
India is a country where all major religions of the world co-exist, many people have their own personal faith and among these in the vast population of India, there are also people who don’t believe in any religion at all. 40% of the population speaks Hindi as their mother tongue but the majority of the population cannot speak the same. It is the land of white, black and brown without such racialism which is a feature of some developed countries. There are 22 scheduled languages, which means 22 different scripts, one script for each language and there are many more yet to be formally recognized. 1500 dialects are spoken, and an astonishing fact is r every 5 miles you will new vocabularies for the same language. Coming to her geographical beauty there are mountains, valleys, plateaus, deserts, cold deserts, coasts and plains. You will find every possible geographical structure and formation in her lap. When it comes to its cuisines, there is no need to even elaborate; just the humble potato could be cooked in 300 different ways. So inducting India into an experiment to set it to an identical ideology nationwide is not only preposterous but also catastrophic in nature and magnitude. The countries which are based on religious identities like Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran are the examples if one is looking for completely failed states. There are a huge number of drawbacks in such a kind of system like human rights violations, slow or negligible economic growth, citizen’s problems overlooked often by the government, democracy being under threat constantly and many more.
Our clamour for freedom heard by the world and struggle to achieve it seen, adorned and preserved in history. Indians sacrificed and offered their lives from 1857 revolt to the freedom at midnight 1947. Before the birth of freedom, India endured every pain of labour in the form of her partition and massacre of her children of millions by their own brothers. It was just not the partition of the land but the partition of heart and soul.
Now after 73 years of our independence we still have the world largest population of poorest. 1/3rd of the world’s population of poorer lives in India. At the time of independence, the literacy rate of India was 16% and out of them, only 7% of women were able to read and write. The situation has now changed tremendously, India’s literacy in 2011 was 74.04% which means still 1 out of 4 cannot read and write. 33% of women are still living in the darkness of illiteracy. There are numbers of girls who leave their schools during their teens because there is no proper facility to change pads in their schools. In 2019, 44% of schools have no connection of electricity, 40% of school have no playground (as per THE HINDU, 2020-2021 parliamentary report). High, school dropout rate, poor infrastructural support to industries, ancient and exploitative labour laws, poor health facility. The maternal mortality rate of India in 2014-15 was 122 out 100000 which is still far behind as compared to England and America where the maternal mortality is 13.4 and 23.8 respectively.
The ambition of the perhaps the greatest man of, this millennium, Gandhi ji, to wipe every tear from every eye. With all its flaws India has the ability to thrive as the greatest Asian country, by 2020 when the world is ageing, India is absurdly young. The average age of Indians is 29 years. 99% enrollment in primary school, though the challenges are enormous if we can equip this generation with education and morals we can say to the world, we are coming.