Azadi under Siege

A new radio advertisement playing on FM stations by a mobile service provider has an interesting take on ways to celebrate this year’s Independence day.

The voice in the advertisement says you can watch the tricolour unfurl from the Red Fort and feel a sense of pride and patriotism or you can watch a patriotic film to carry you through the day. It is the third suggestion that is off the beaten track.

The advertisement exhorts consumers to come up with ideas to rebuild your country as a sign of your patriotism. Listening to it while driving your car, you cannot but applaud the creative team for such an unusual message. 

As a child, the Independence day celebrations always held a special place in our hearts. We looked forward to this eventful day and strutted about charged with enough adrenaline rush to last the celebrations of the I-Day, thanks in large measure to All India Radio and those ubiquitous horn loudspeakers strung in pairs on every street poles in towns and cities blaring out patriotic Hindi film songs 24x7 as a build-up to August 15.

Coming back to the advertisement I was talking about. Although the tag line gives you goose bumps by the end of it, it’s the eerie silence that follows and soon fills your car cabin as you drive away to your destination. A collage of disturbing images crosses your mind. Naked machismo in the name of gau-raksha, student protests being silenced and protestors hounded in defense of nationalism, tricolour being used as tool of political intimidation, protestors being used as guinea pigs to test the potency of the latest consignment in the government’s weapons laboratory. Join these dots and you will find a new development matrix tom-tommed as a pre-requisite for ‘achche din.’ 

As we celebrate our 70th Independence and with it the rise of a ‘new India’ we shudder to think the promise it holds for us. A promise where the voice of the weak and under-privileged shall be gagged, a promise where your patriotism shall be put under scanner because, one, you were not found wearing it on your sleeves, literally and figuratively both, and, second for not raising ‘Bharat mata ki jay’ slogan to a decibel laid down in the Hindutva statute book. A promise where you will have to pay with your life for what you eat and what you wear.

The advertisement assumes harbinger of ‘achche din’ when efforts were being made on the double to push the country to a precipice of hate and prejudice. It assumes a favourable climate when in reality the climate was showing signs of strain due to preponderance of forces emitting higher levels of particulate matter detrimental to inclusive growth. It sought to instil patriotism when the gau-rakshaks were celebrating idea of Independence by thrashing Dalits and minorities on the streets.

The advertisement assumed rewards for a good idea when the only idea selling like hot cakes was dysfunctional nationalism, propagated and serviced by an institution populated by a band of cavemen - who claimed control over their basic instincts and made up for that disabling loss by nursing their natural instincts - whose twisted ideology gained sudden traction and now resonate in power corridors.

The founding fathers had envisaged an India free of racial, caste or religious discrimination, enjoining upon citizens a set of constitutional rights, including the right to express herself openly and without fear of a reprisal by the state, denied to them under the British rule. Aren’t protests a throbbing manifestation of a living democracy and its brutal suppression a sign of the idea of democracy gone awry.

Isn’t the idea of India best enshrined in the constitution. Isn’t the idea of freedom all about living the Indian Constitution in all its manifest and un-manifest glory. Isn’t ‘Swachchta’ also about keeping your intent clean and above board. Isn’t ‘swachchta’ also about cleaning off cobwebs of mutual distrust.

The spirit of Azadi has come under siege. . It seems the political masters have read the freedom script upside down. The idea of freedom has been reduced to an exclusive made in India batter beaten into shape and closely resembling a fat cake of cow dung. Azadi seems a sum total of opportunities squandered in the pursuit of making a homogeneous India when what needed to be celebrated was its plurality - the cornerstone of our constitution.