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| Independence versus freedom: some ruminations | | | ABID SHAH
NEW DELHI, August 13: Another independence day – August 15 – will come and go for the 63rd time. The past 62 similar dates with history of a vast multitude of Indians, who are over a billion now, have gone by without leaving a mark on their tenuous lot or lives. Independence Day’s conviviality have generally been confined to Delhi, or State capitals engaging well heeled officials or at best schoolchildren whose innocent play of patriotic tunes lends the day a keen profoundness that can thrall an otherwise placid, mundane and uneventful existence that most Indians prefer in order to cover up huge disappointments from the coveted independence of the country.
The reason for this being that the independence, howsoever hard earned, remains short of freedom. Its observance in official confines ends up as a tame affair that goes without enthusing bulk of Indians with the fire of freedom for which countless people had laid down their lives through better part of a whole century beginning with the first war of Independence in the summer of 1857. It has only been a travesty of vision and wisdom that until this day the 1857 war has mainly been referred to as mutiny in order to blur not just history but also mass sensibilities and consciousness of even well meaning Indians.
This anomaly is not confined to historical accounts of freedom movement alone but has also permeated in Indian ethos controlled and guided by Indian ruling classes. They have succeeded in perpetuating misplaced sense of history and calculated vision by keeping away public attention from the ideals shared by countless martyrs through the freedom struggle and their disciples who emulated their example by enduring jail term, unbearable torture while in custody and other hardships that came their way and that of their dependants through the course of the valiant fight put up by them through the struggle for India’s freedom.
This is what a group led by one of the descendants of the late Bhagat Singh strongly feels about. The famed martyr’s nephew, Professor Jagmohan Singh, took a long time of painful introspection before coming to the conclusion that warped view of history has been meant to steal the spirit and will of martyrs’ struggle in order to cripple the rights of millions of Indians to basic dignified existence that lies buried under a heap of squalor and unremitting poverty despite over six-decade-old self-rule.
The most potent proof of this, according to him, is India Gate, a so called martyrs’ memorial, built to commemorate the memory of the ‘saviours’ of the country whereas names of those Indian soldiers who fell in first world war while fighting for the British are etched on India Gate. Professor Singh says that India Gate is not martyrs’ memorial but a memorial of protectors of British Empire. Its foundation was laid on February 10 1921 and ten years later when Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev walked to gallows, Lord Irwin declared it a national monument to distort India’s history and its people’s psyche.
And to add insult to the injury, the India Gate is taken by post-independent India’s rulers as has been envisaged by their British predecessors. Floral wreaths and armed forces salutes offered at India Gate on as important occasions as Republic Day and Independence Day call for reconfiguring history and consciousness. Not only this, after the 1971 war and sacrifices made by Indian soldiers while fighting for creation of Bangladesh, a sacred flame like Amar Jawan Jyoti was lit under the shadows of this monument of slavery built under British Raj.
Gopal Rai, an associate of Professor Singh, points out that the continuing state patronage offered to India Gate is against public sentiment since the Government had to remove after independence the statue of King George and other British higher-ups that India Gate has earlier been strewn with. They have now been put up North at Delhi Ridge off Kingsway Camp for the sake of their restoration and upkeep.
For over two years now, Professor Singh and Rai have been demanding a monument befitting the memory of countless martyrs who fought the British since 1757 when East India Company and its fleet first touched Indian shores and got transformed and entrenched in British rule throughout the country that continued until 1947. The two stress the need for a third freedom movement or Teesra Swadhinta Andolan to disentangle India from imperialist shackles.
A series of fasts and protests undertaken by them along with their supporters for such martyrs’ memorial to replace what they call to be insignia of slavery at India Gate has brought them polite acknowledgments from Rashtrapati Bhavan and Ministry of Culture. Yet Gopal Rai feels that their memoranda forwarded to the powers-that-be by President Pratibha Patil and her predecessor Dr Abdul Kalam have only been gathering dust. And, thus, they are forced to undertake another fast from August 9 at Jantar Mantar which will also mark the anniversary of the Quit India Movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi with a call for Do or Die.
Ask Rai what can be achieved even if they succeed in forcing the Government to build a memorial to honour martyrs. He shoots back that the demand is not about just a concrete structure but pertains to resetting the values and ethos that the country has opted for under the influence of British and which persist at the level of policy and approach to citizens. Independence could not remove slavery despite the fact that Britishers sailed home. Those who took over from them try to fill the slot without trying to do away the detrimental part of the British rule.
Among other things this included as costly a tragedy as partition of the country and the divide among the people on communal and parochial lines. This has been unimaginable, says Gopal Rai, when Indians fought together the first war of independence in 1857, irrespective of their caste, creed, faith and belief. Thereafter, parochial programmes were overtly and covertly slipped into the hard disk of society which is still exploited to the hilt and with glee by ruling classes to the detriment of the larger interests of the country and its people. Thus, a beginning has to be made to do away with the deadly divide of the past and its ugly imitation today, argues Rai.
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