India, The Demise of a Dream

“We the people of India, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a sovereign, socialist, secular Democratic Republic and to secure to all its citizens: Justice, social, economic and political; Liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; Equality of status and opportunity; and to promote among them fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual and unity and integrity of the nation; in our constituent assembly this twenty-sixth day of November 1949, do hereby adopt, enact and give ourselves this constitution.”
Preamble to the Indian Constitution

We studied this preamble in detail in school, about what all the words meant and their social implication. I remember at the time it was a source of immense pride to me that our constitution, a hallowed Indian institution, set down such noble ideals for us to follow. I imagined that whatever happened to the country, these tenets would always protect us from straying too far from becoming the great nation we were destined to be.
Today, we have drifted far from the ideals set down in the preamble, far from a secular utopia that was envisioned, we are rapidly descending into the depths of chaos, toward a fundamentalist, theocracy.
We were born into the conflagration of post-independence partition, when the country was divided into two independent nations; India and Pakistan (east Pakistan later became Bangladesh) based on religion. Since then the flames of the religious divide have resisted all attempts to extinguish them. Now fed by the rise of religious extremism across the world, the flames are ready to bring us down burning.
Indian history, recalls how it was the British who built a religious divide in the country to serve their divide and rule colonial policy. The fundamentalist fervour exhibited in the country however leads me to suspect that this may not necessarily be the case. The seeds of fundamentalism are too deeply ingrained in our mentality for them to be the result of a century old policy; we are merely making scapegoats of them, blaming them for our bigotry.
Even if you do blame the British for starting the problem, it was the 60 years of inept political leadership that maintained the divide and introduced further fractures in Indian society. Caste or religion based politics, communalism and regionalism are time-honoured methods employed by Indian politicians to ensure their ascendancy to power. Our society is no longer divided only into Hindus and Muslims; Hindus are at odds with each other based on caste and community (to the same effect as the Shia-Sunni divide in Islamic nations). The whole nation is further separated based on other factors like language. Again, blaming politicians (almost a national pastime) achieves nothing; they merely recognised and played on our suspicion, fears and bigotry.
If any conclusions can be drawn on human instinct from Indian society, it would be that we inherently fear anything different or strange. We are threatened by anything we don’t understand and feel the need to protect ourselves at any cost; including that of violence. The most deep-seated partition in Indian society is that between Hinduism and Islam. Both communities share a strong sense of mistrust of each other, mainly because neither understands or has ever tried to understand the other. Sixty years of mistrust has resulted in the ghettoisation (?) of a majority of the Indian Muslim population. Ghettos only serve to further reduce interaction between the communities and increase tension.
The Hindu community is not much better off, a vast majority view Muslim Indians as outsiders who are not to be trusted.
A friend of mine in college illustrated this view when he commented on the (then) recent Godhra riots. He basically believed that the Muslims being a minority community should ‘behave’ themselves in India, which according to him is basically a Hindu country and that, the Hindu response was justified accordingly.
That is where I believe that we have failed our constitution. There is no point in paying lip service to grand ideals, while our populace has other beliefs. What we are doing in essence involves believing that there is nothing really wrong with the country till the whole damn situation blows up in our collective faces.
That’s what happened on Thursday, when three bombs went off in Muslim dominated neighbourhoods in a small town in Maharashtra. It was clearly the handiwork of Hindu extremists, in retaliation for the (11/7) bombing of local trains in Bombay. All this will achieve is to further alienate the minorities and exacerbate the situation.
There is a clear chain of related events leading up to Thursdays’ blasts, leading from Godhra. It does not take an idiot to foresee where this is going to lead us, more bombs and more violence is all I can see in our future.The only solution I can see is in educating our future generations better than we have been educated. Instead of teaching them how the British divided and ruled, we need to teach them on how our politicians are doing the same, how over the last sixty years extremism has claimed innumerable lives. Instead of instilling in them a sense of pride for living in an independent country, we need to teach them to be ashamed of living in a country where religion means more than humanity. Only then will they emerge, receptive to change and ready to build a nation from the ashes we hand over.