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Disintegration of India looking more and more likely in today's climate
By A.K. Ghosh ,The Statesman/Asia News Network
On the eve of India's independence in 1947, Winston Churchill, leader of Britain's Conservative opposition, said, "power will go into the hands of rascals, rogues and freebooters. Not a bottle of water or a loaf of bread will escape taxation. Only the air will be free, and the blood of these hungry millions will be on the head of Attlee. These are men of straw of whom no trace will be found after a year. They will fight among themselves and India will be lost in political squabble."
Not that Churchill was motivated by any genuine concern for the well-being of the people of India. Throughout his tenure as prime minister, he had been declaring that he would not preside over the dismemberment of the British Empire. Yet with the passage of time his speech has proved prophetic considering what is going on presently in every part of India.
On the Brink of
Emotional Disintegration
That India is on the brink of emotional disintegration cannot be refuted. If it continues unabated, it is feared, geographical disintegration will remain only a formality. Long back in August 1947, Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote: "Ye daagh ujala, ye sahar quazeeda sahar/Wo intezaar tha jiska, ye wo sahar nahi hai" (This stained dawn is not the one we waited for).
The cancer of disintegration continues to spread in and poison the Indian body politic. Constitutional safeguards for the protection of religious, linguistic and cultural minorities seem always inadequate. From safeguard to quotas and from quotas to demand for autonomy — the pressure escalates.
The Constitution (42nd Amendment) Act, 1976 added to the inconveniences by changing the preamble to the Constitution, which declared India a "Sovereign Democratic Republic" to read "Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic." Since then everybody has been talking of secularism in the right or wrong way. From the 1980s onward, aggressive liberalism encouraged the rise of fundamentalism as a natural corollary.
Even 68 years after Independence, we are prone to identifying ourselves in narrow, religious or linguistic terms. Allegiance to the part has become stronger than loyalty to the motherland. There is a certain contradiction when one speaks of national integration in the Indian perspective. This flows from the very concept of nationalism. A child of the Renaissance, which transformed Europe into nation states in the 17th and 18th centuries, nationalism claims for each distinct group of people with cultural, linguistic, traditional and religious affinities the right to statehood. Thus, historically it has often been a divisive political force.
This exotic concept was inducted into the Indian political arena in the early years of the freedom struggle. It was an inspiring slogan against foreign domination and also sustained demands for the right to self-determination of the people of India as a nation. Raj Narayan Bose's "Prospectus of a Society for the Promotion of Nation feeling among the Educated Natives of Bengal" used the word "national" to evoke patriotic fervor. The appeal was, however, to Hindu, and not Indian nationalism. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's "Anandamath" was also directed at similar sectional sentiment.
The Word, Nation
After A.O. Hume's Indian National Union called itself the Indian National Congress at its Bombay meeting in December 1885, the word nation and its derivatives came to be freely used in India's political vocabulary. At the second Congress session, Calcutta, 1886, Rajendralal Mitra said, "For long our fathers lived, as individuals only or as families, but henceforward, I hope, we shall be living as a nation." At the same session, Surendranath Banerjee hoped that "the feeling of sympathy and brotherhood between the different Indian races may grow and deepen ... and draw together the vast distant parts of the Empire and bind all races, all creeds and nationalities that inhabit this great country in one golden chain of brotherly love and affection." Incidentally, his autobiography was significantly titled "A Nation in the Making."
These pioneers of the freedom movement could hardly have foreseen that their appeal to nationalism would act as a double edged sword. Today the creation of rather non-viable states merely to oblige ethnic groups and political accords with exponents of separatism, though permitted under the Constitution, are seen as the center's soft accommodation. The traditional appeal to nationalism is bound to prove self-defeating. Instead, the idea of Indianism should be promoted, which should evoke response from Indians as a body, transcending religious, ethnic racial and linguistic barriers.
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and others suggested the idea long ago that Indians be treated and trained to consider themselves Indians first, which evokes emotional integration of the people. George Yule also stressed this, who as the first Englishman to preside over a Congress session, said, "The watchword for the Congressman is Indian first, Hindu, Muhammedan, Parsi, Christian, Punjabee, Maratha, Bengali afterwards."
At the Lahore Congress, 1893, Dadabhai Naraoji struck the same note, "I am above all an Indian, our country is India, our nationality is Indian." The British effected political and administrative unification of the country but encouraged, as a matter of policy, communal and sectional groups. This process of fragmentation has to be undone if the country is not to risk meeting the fate of Soviet Union.
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/comment...l-/2015/12/22/454087/p2/Disintegration-of.htm
By A.K. Ghosh ,The Statesman/Asia News Network
On the eve of India's independence in 1947, Winston Churchill, leader of Britain's Conservative opposition, said, "power will go into the hands of rascals, rogues and freebooters. Not a bottle of water or a loaf of bread will escape taxation. Only the air will be free, and the blood of these hungry millions will be on the head of Attlee. These are men of straw of whom no trace will be found after a year. They will fight among themselves and India will be lost in political squabble."
Not that Churchill was motivated by any genuine concern for the well-being of the people of India. Throughout his tenure as prime minister, he had been declaring that he would not preside over the dismemberment of the British Empire. Yet with the passage of time his speech has proved prophetic considering what is going on presently in every part of India.
On the Brink of
Emotional Disintegration
That India is on the brink of emotional disintegration cannot be refuted. If it continues unabated, it is feared, geographical disintegration will remain only a formality. Long back in August 1947, Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote: "Ye daagh ujala, ye sahar quazeeda sahar/Wo intezaar tha jiska, ye wo sahar nahi hai" (This stained dawn is not the one we waited for).
The cancer of disintegration continues to spread in and poison the Indian body politic. Constitutional safeguards for the protection of religious, linguistic and cultural minorities seem always inadequate. From safeguard to quotas and from quotas to demand for autonomy — the pressure escalates.
The Constitution (42nd Amendment) Act, 1976 added to the inconveniences by changing the preamble to the Constitution, which declared India a "Sovereign Democratic Republic" to read "Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic." Since then everybody has been talking of secularism in the right or wrong way. From the 1980s onward, aggressive liberalism encouraged the rise of fundamentalism as a natural corollary.
Even 68 years after Independence, we are prone to identifying ourselves in narrow, religious or linguistic terms. Allegiance to the part has become stronger than loyalty to the motherland. There is a certain contradiction when one speaks of national integration in the Indian perspective. This flows from the very concept of nationalism. A child of the Renaissance, which transformed Europe into nation states in the 17th and 18th centuries, nationalism claims for each distinct group of people with cultural, linguistic, traditional and religious affinities the right to statehood. Thus, historically it has often been a divisive political force.
This exotic concept was inducted into the Indian political arena in the early years of the freedom struggle. It was an inspiring slogan against foreign domination and also sustained demands for the right to self-determination of the people of India as a nation. Raj Narayan Bose's "Prospectus of a Society for the Promotion of Nation feeling among the Educated Natives of Bengal" used the word "national" to evoke patriotic fervor. The appeal was, however, to Hindu, and not Indian nationalism. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's "Anandamath" was also directed at similar sectional sentiment.
The Word, Nation
After A.O. Hume's Indian National Union called itself the Indian National Congress at its Bombay meeting in December 1885, the word nation and its derivatives came to be freely used in India's political vocabulary. At the second Congress session, Calcutta, 1886, Rajendralal Mitra said, "For long our fathers lived, as individuals only or as families, but henceforward, I hope, we shall be living as a nation." At the same session, Surendranath Banerjee hoped that "the feeling of sympathy and brotherhood between the different Indian races may grow and deepen ... and draw together the vast distant parts of the Empire and bind all races, all creeds and nationalities that inhabit this great country in one golden chain of brotherly love and affection." Incidentally, his autobiography was significantly titled "A Nation in the Making."
These pioneers of the freedom movement could hardly have foreseen that their appeal to nationalism would act as a double edged sword. Today the creation of rather non-viable states merely to oblige ethnic groups and political accords with exponents of separatism, though permitted under the Constitution, are seen as the center's soft accommodation. The traditional appeal to nationalism is bound to prove self-defeating. Instead, the idea of Indianism should be promoted, which should evoke response from Indians as a body, transcending religious, ethnic racial and linguistic barriers.
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and others suggested the idea long ago that Indians be treated and trained to consider themselves Indians first, which evokes emotional integration of the people. George Yule also stressed this, who as the first Englishman to preside over a Congress session, said, "The watchword for the Congressman is Indian first, Hindu, Muhammedan, Parsi, Christian, Punjabee, Maratha, Bengali afterwards."
At the Lahore Congress, 1893, Dadabhai Naraoji struck the same note, "I am above all an Indian, our country is India, our nationality is Indian." The British effected political and administrative unification of the country but encouraged, as a matter of policy, communal and sectional groups. This process of fragmentation has to be undone if the country is not to risk meeting the fate of Soviet Union.
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/comment...l-/2015/12/22/454087/p2/Disintegration-of.htm
