[Reader-list] this is called Nationalism

[S.Fatima]

I guess nobody can define it better than Tarun Vijay!!


Tricolour's territory
5 Sep 2007, 1126 hrs IST,Tarun Vijay
(Times of India online)

Just finished watching Bharat Bala's Jana Gana Mana
(Times Music) which is such an exhilarating video
presentation that words are incapable to express what
the heart has experienced. The way top singers of the
nation sung it, it was a virtual treat to the eyes,
like worshipping God in a temple, like sunshine in a
blooming mustard field with the Himalayas in the
background. Like a rainbow over Gaumukh, the source of
the Ganga and a child's smile in her mother's lap. Was
it the magic of the singers or the music or the
directorial excellence? I think it was the impact of
our nation's grandeur, the immense canvas of the
tricolour's territory, the magic of motherland that
mesmerised. Rest were only the suitable carriers of
that heritage. We feel blessed to have been born in
this land called Bharat. To have Ganga and Sindhu and
Kaveri and Brahmaputra. Where the Himalayas is ours
and an ocean bearing our nation's name. 

A desert produces the best of the warriors and
musicians alike and the backwater province is
incredible as God's own country. Here no Galileo was
ever hanged for his beliefs and though the brutalities
of the barbarians bruised us, yet we produced Shivajis
and Guru Gobind Singhs and empires as powerful as Sri
Vijaya. The zero was invented by us and so was the
finest silk and rust-less steel. The circumference of
the earth was calculated by our forefathers and the
medical sciences flourished here while the rest of the
world was beginning to explore meanings of life. In
poetry, languages and culture the Vedic people showed
the light to the world and gave the best gift of
Sanskrit, the most scientific language we have ever
known. Above all we gave the message –the world is a
family – and all paths lead to one God. 

Harmony replaced confrontationist approach and though
the people who had their first black students
graduating from a non-segregated school as late as in
late fifties (and the 'little rock nine' were honoured
in 1999 by US Congress) wonder how and why our
democracy is flowering in spite of too many anarchist
trends, we are not surprised because to live this way
has been in our blood. Even when there was no one
political state we were always known as Bharat and
India. Because we believed in cultural nationhood that
always was there and the world recognised us only as
Bharat, Aryavarta or India and not by Rajputana or
Madras. 

And look what we have made of this great nation today.
Our rivers are dirty, Himalayan pride has been
replaced by Himalayan blunders losing heights to the
neighbouring foes, hateful divisive politics,
all-pervasive corruption, liars and lascivious
masquerading as politicians, where another political
party is a worse foe than the enemy across the border
who killed our jawans! A polity that takes pride in
denouncing and disowning her own heritage, stifles
Sanskrit and insults the majority by announcing
reservations for just one 'vote-powerful' religious
group becomes the biggest factor to devitalise the
responsive and the resistive spirit of the masses. The
basic ideas of the threads that bound us as one people
for a millennium get trivialised like a filmy duet
dotted with whistling and a drunken frenzy. Such a
political power represents the ugliest face the nation
has ever seen and the leader compromises on national
issues just for the sake of a gun salute at the last
rites. 

IT sector's 'greatest' revolution is exposed when we
find ourselves standing forty-sixth in the global IT
competitiveness survey and the scandalous faces are
touted as Presidential candidates. We celebrate
National Language Day on September 14, as if attending
the funeral of Hindi, pursuing vigorously a
de-Hindiisation policy of the state and show
sympathies for the culprit of the tinsel world
demoralising the honest and the upright. 

Our ancestors built Bamiyan Buddha, Angkor Vat and
Jaisalmer fort. We raise buildings that are shabby
pigeonholes with cracks and red beetle nut spits
colouring every nook and corner so much that one has
to put calendar pictures of Ram, Nanak and Christ to
dissuade the man who spits compulsively not to dirty
the pathway or the staircase. Our assertions to honour
national icons are limited to personal family and
self-promotional vision. We lived with a Connaught
Place for five decades but renamed it after family
leaders who have already almost every big thing named
after them and not after Yashoda and Kanha because the
former benefited the politician and the latter would
have been dubbed as 'communal'. 

This is the courage, creativity and the conviction of
today's movers and shakers. 

Hardly any leader of the nation lives and works in a
place which has a touch of Indian architecture or the
fragrance of Indian revolutionaries. New buildings in
'Lutyen's Delhi' are restricted to copy colonial
styles only and the Viceroy's Palace, rechristened as
Rashtrapati Bhawan, proudly shows the statues and
pictures of the hunting campaigns of the Moghuls,
British kings and queens .Not a single Hindu emperor
finds a place of honour there, neither do Indian
leaders of resurgence and freedom like Sri Aurobindo,
Subhash Chandra Bose, Bhagat Singh or Swami
Vivekananada. Those who felt 'high' in accepting a
firangi as the first Governor-General of free India
would feel ashamed to have the tallest building or the
finest hall where new governments are sworn in after
Adi Sankar or Dayananda or Ram or Krishna or Gobind
Singh or Shivaji. Why? Please visit the Rashtrapati
Bhawan site
(http://presidentofindia.nic.in/panoramic_view) and
find out if anything that pronounces the India effect
dominantly has a place there. 

Because we love to hate ourselves while walking in the
shoes of the colonial masters. We treat our own people
with the same contempt and distrust as the British
did. Our laws governing publication of a book and a
newspaper, a theatre show, policing, postal matters,
vehicle registration are same or directly derived from
the nineteenth-century British laws which were created
for a subjugated people to be strangulated for wanting
to be free. They treated Indian Army men inferior to
the firangs and gave them discriminatory salaries,
using them as tools to strengthen colonial rule, yet
the Indian Army celebrates with honour their
predecessor British officers, Raising Days and Victory
Days. That's our sense of a national legacy of heroes
and war-victories. It's nothing but a manifestation of
self-negation overpowering self-realisation. 

Do you know what VT stands for, written as nationality
code at the tail of every plane that belongs to India?
It means 'Viceroy's Territory' and during the British
period every plane bought by the Indian government had
to put it at its tail prominently. None bothered about
it even after 1947 and it continues till today! 

>From the ASEAN website to unmistakably all foreign
governments and magazines publish India's map with a
truncated Kashmir. Microsoft produces all the software
with a wrong Indian territorial depiction. But we
sheepishly accept donations from it and the government
remains the biggest purchaser of MS ware. One foreign
magazine published Kashmir's reference as a sovereign
independent country, in a nation-to-nation description
of World Cup Football fever, like mentioning India,
Israel and Kashmir. I wanted to cancel its India
correspondent's accreditation while serving on Press
Accreditation Committee till they corrected. Yet all
the governments chose to 'ignore' it continuously.
They are just needed to have the 'unacceptable' map
stamped with a line that it doesn't depict correct
territory – but it's done just for a few copies
reaching India and passed through Indian customs. Does
that suffice as a correction? We don't get hurt or
feel angry on such violations of our territorial
integrity. 

It seems like a God's gift that we still have been
blessed with Indians who have preserved and cared the
essence of Indianness. Like farmers, tribals,
teachers, labourers, deprived sections and the great
lower middle-class. They make our Kumbh Melas biggest
congregations on this earth, vote most
enthusiastically, celebrate festivals with gusto and
gaiety and provide us services and food and
nourishment and not the urban rich escapist class
which consumes most and delivers least. 

Really we feel proud to still be Indians because of
the common Indian citizen, unsung yet essential to our
tricolour's sparkle and genuine leaders like Lata
Mangeshkars, Bhimsen Joshis, Amjad Ali Khans, Lakshmi
Mittals , Tatas and Shimit Amins who make us look at
the tricolour with pride and hope and give us an
adrenaline of the Chak De spirit. The territory of the
tricolour is encroached by small people occupying big
positions. Let the real Bharat feel the hurt and get
angry over this trespass and bring the deserving to
the corridors of governance. If it's a blessing to be
born in this land, it's incumbent upon us to justify
our being the children of Mother India that holds the
colours of our hearts. 

The author is the editor of Panchjanya, a Hindi weekly
brought out by the RSS. The views expressed are his
personal. 




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