Thinking anew about New India

By Professor

S.P. Bhattacharyya

(The writer is former Principal, Assam Engineering College)

This article is about what Mr. Ram Madhav, one of the top ideologues of the present ruling political dispensation reportedly said at Silchar lately, that “...the New India will not be an American version of India, rather an India for which we fought”. Further, paying tribute to Dr. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, he asserted the resolve of ‘solving the issue of illegal immigrants and protection of the rights of genuine Indian citizens in order to ensure that every person enjoys his rights’. I do not know how far the people of Silchar will feel reassured by the reference to Dr. Mookerjee who escaped becoming a foreigner himself because of his residential location on the right side of the border at the right time i.e., when the geo-political earthquake struck Bengal (and also Punjab) in 1947.

The first of Mr. Madhav’s two assertions — that the New India for which we fought etc, etc. — is no doubt absolutely right and reasonable. But should not ‘we’ also include the so-called foreigners, some in their 80s and 90s (like the author of this article) as well as the progenies of those who are no more and who also made their share of sacrifices for the freedom of the country, the fruits of which the so-called genuine Indians of today are now harvesting ? We all know that those who entered India from time to time as invaders by the force of arms and settled here permanently are not considered foreigners, but should those who moved to the truncated larger part of the same country (that retained the name India) from the other truncated parts which got a new name Pakistan) be branded as foreigners, even though many of them were freedom fighters themselves?

Before proceeding further, this myth of artificially made foreigners (out of original Indians with 5,000 year old legacy of Indian history behind them) has to be debunked. We all know that the British East India Company, by an act of treachery, defeated the Muslim ruler of the then Bengal in 1755 and gradually took control of almost the whole of India, though the British Government took full control of the country formally only after the failed Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. Since then India became a colony of the British Empire and all Indians, Hindus or Muslims, Bengalis or Biharis became subjects of the King or Queen of England. In next one hundred years or so, in 1947, the British, for considerations best known to them, decided to leave the country by partitioning it into two parts. Till today we do not know the real reasons for this diabolical act for dividing crores of people who were in possession of this land from time immemorial and evolved into a diverse but united cultural entity by assimilating different religions, languages, ethnicities and cultures. The British did this by first contriving the mischievous ‘Two Nation’ theory and then polarising the people along communal lines with the help of Muslim League and their Hindu counterparts. By launching Goebbelsian propaganda of exaggerated stories about atrocities from both sides, they succeeded in creating two separate nations out of one and managed to make them sworn enemies of one another from the very moment of their creation. In the artificially charged social environment of the country, partition was held out as a viable solution to communal disharmony before the leaders of both sides, though in reality it turned out to be the main cause of permanent enmity and the unprecedented communal strife and mayhem that followed.

Lakhs of lives were lost, particularly in Bengal and Punjab, crores of people lost their home and hearth and entered independent India as refugees, only to be branded as foreigners and ‘silent invaders’ now. Is this because they did not force their entry like the armed invaders of the past? A section of their ungrateful compatriots (who were lucky to escape the same fate), however, were not late in discovering a treasure of fortune for themselves in the miseries of these hapless people who are in fact no less Indian and no less original in letter and spirit than those obsessed with the fear of foreigners to-day. Like in any natural calamity (earthquake, deluge, etc.) when people's suffering knows no bound, a section of people (politicians-contractors-bureaucrats) saw for themselves a god-sent (in this case British-sent) opportunity for becoming millionaires and many of them actually became so by exploiting the miseries of these nameless, faceless, half-fed and half-clad people living by the canal side and river side of independent India. Are these people the real cause of every ‘genuine’ Indian not enjoying his rights in Assam or in other parts of India? Will these rights be automatically restored to all ‘genuine’ Indians once they (variously estimated to be in lakhs) are thrown out of the country (if at all possible) or dumped in detention camps as the other alternative? Mr. Ram Madhav must be having the answer.

Coming to his other assertion, let it be known that the New India perforce cannot become an American version of India, because America and many other western countries became what they are mainly by exploiting other places and races of the Earth over centuries, and by dint of their superior scientific and technological skill backed by a sense of inclusive nationalism. It is no longer possible to do the same today because there is hardly any new continent left to be discovered and exploited. Therefore, we cannot expect to catch up with them following the same path treaded by them in the past. To build a New India, we have to think of alternative development models based on indigenous resources, human resources in particular, tempered with the scientific and humanitarian approach to nation building of the West of last two/three centuries. Let us hope that there is honesty of purpose in what our leaders say and do, and the aim is not to make the ‘New India’ a replica of the India of yore, knowingly or unknowingly.

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