Aspire and Assert

The Times of India

6 Mar 2009, 1115 hrs IST,

Tarun Vijay

Let the people take over the spirit of the Red Fort and declare from its ramparts: "Honourable leaders, having cheated us for the last six decades and made politics a business of scoundrels, for once give India her due in the form of a nation-centric polity beyond family lords and stinking mafiosi of castiests, extortionists and murderers."

India certainly deserves a better lot to be elected members of a parliament which saw shameful scenes last time when a nuclear deal was being pushed to win the vote.

It’s meaningless to boast of our most ancient civilization, culture and values if we see what we have today. Bragging about a past that has no bearing on our behaviour today is worse than running after a mirage. Only the insecure get into it. Even if you forget all the great leaders of the past and stop reading their memoirs and prescriptions for the nation’s ills but keep a straight spine to live for India’s better future with honesty and transparency that would suffice. We will surely build new leaders but for once please strive to free your beloved nation of those who have survived far too long on peoples' lethargy and inaction.

A Hindu nation never cared who wrote the Vedas, how they were revealed or conceived and who authored the Upanishads. The only element that made us survive the vicissitudes of history was the strength to live the ideals and values that were worth living for this nation called Bharat Varsha.

We have been electing representatives who hardly have an idea of the nation they are tasked to protect and help flower. They have no sense of history, a history of our people and civilization, and do not any idea why we had to go through too many assaults by foreigners and how we were able to resist them so valiantly for centuries. Yet why has speaking about it has become a matter of hesitation for the neo-scholarship? We insult retired decorated soldiers when they are forced to agitate for a mere uniformity in pensions and scales though the lawmakers increase their salaries astronomically at the fag end of the session. That’s our patriotism.

Elect India this time. People who would try sincerely to make for the lost years of development and raise the value of our citizenship. It must be a matter of great confidence and pride to be an Indian citizen. Leaders and the administration must look at our people with respect and love, which we lack completely today as the nation is still run on British laws and the colonial attitude. No police reforms, no electoral corrections, no administrative changes in the environment of governance. The same hateful arrogance is seen in the bureaucrats and ministers who get a chance to find a seat of power. The way an officer of Emergency fame and thoroughly partisan was chosen, and supported by a section of the media and politicians, to handle elections, ignoring the advice of a man of integrity, speaks volumes of the depths we have fallen to.

Bribing is a matter of routine, piling of files is a thumb rule, small measures of publicity like increasing Haj subsidy or providing Ganga Jal on Shivratri become great milestones of political achievements while primary schools, village health centres and energy and water resources management are left to the mercy of sidelined ministers. The "profitable" departments are coal, mining and rural development, which are less checked and monitored but have enough meat to enjoy. We have a media whose brilliance comes to the fore in trivialities like the Mangalore pub incidence and which is completely hooked to Washington-London mania. We forget that for India the Middle East, Asia and especially East Asia with China taking a natural prominence are the regions that weigh more than anything else.

East is our natural constituency of diplomacy which is nurtured by age-old affinities. Similarly, at home we ignore the northeast. More than English, we must emphasize on learning Japanese and Chinese. That’s the future, not the US. It’s no use saying Hindus were ever a proselytizing religion. Declare with a truly Indian confidence that this world would be a better place to live if it follows the Hindu way of life and send missionaries of Hinduism to make people appreciate the Vedic way of a happy and mutually respectful society. Be a proud missionary yourself and take some inspiration from the times when Asoka the great, who has given us our national motif, sent his son to spread the message of Dharma. Why hesitate now? But we have learnt to live with all wrongs like we lived calmly during the British colonial period. Only a handful, less than 5%, participated in the freedom struggle. That’s the bare bitter truth. Should we not wake up even now?

Should our personal egos and likings be a deciding factor, or in a critical time like this can we rise above them and decide?

I was at Allahabad University sometime ago to address a students’ convention and have a Q&A session that ran for more than two hours in the Deligacy campus. They all wanted change. Give us clean rivers, easily available drinking water (since the advent of the mineral-water bottle culture, which is neither mineral water nor safe ones, one quipped), get rid of illiterate priests and a mindset that feels ashamed at just and rightful Hindu assertions that teaching Vedas is considered a Hindu, and hence, a communal and discardable act. They were enamoured with the youth chant but wanted a leadership that has a spine. In the evening the octogenarian leader of Vishwa Hindu Parishad Shri Ashok Singhal invited me to join a discussion on the agenda for Arundhati-Vashishtha Trust he has created to disseminate the scientific and Indic civilisational knowledge among the people. When we were leaving he said: "It’s time to forget our internal differences for the sake of greater unity among Hindu nationalists." We will be sinning if driven by personal egos, we work to defeat our own ilk. An India led by an Indian nationalist whom we know would be preferable to one led by a lady of a foreign origin.

If that happens we will finally have a post-Nehruvian raj that is more connected with the soil and people's aspirations. Is it too much to ask to have cleaner and honest members of Parliament who would ensure better roads, bridges, primary schools, women’s empowerment and a scheduled caste-scheduled tribe upsurge that will take our nation miles ahead and unshackle us from the redundant ritualism and caste-based differences and atrocities.

Why can’t we have, unhesitatingly the best models of pilgrim centres and temple management that cater to the needs of the young and mobile and do not resist any new reform? Let us have a leadership with spine that will make India the strongest military power on earth without any apologies.

After all, we have a burden on our shoulders to keep India free from traitors and terrorists and defend borders with a few unfinished vows to be completed as directed by the unanimous resolutions of Parliament. The platform people, with one leg abroad and one in the stinking wealth in Swiss accounts can’t do that. Let a new Chanakya create a Chandra Gupta to uproot the denationalized politicians and give us hope.

Merely ritualizing the "pub bharo" to "Parliament bharo" drills is nothing but further moisturizing the filthy dustbin.