What does revolution mean to contemporary India!

Ill try to make this as short as I possibly can. The subject I’m trying to discuss here is Revolution. To a lot of the readers, this might seem a particularly vague topic to discuss; this is mainly because when we think of revolutions, we think of history, basically what we learnt from our history books. So naturally, we would tend to dismiss this thinking it’s just a matter of past. Is this necessarily true? Did the people that revolutionized the common world as we know it today dismiss it at the time thinking the same thing?

If you’ve finally agreed to grasp the idea, you’d tend to ask why I’m bring this up right now in the first place. There’s a solid reason behind this. I’m an Indian, for a long time I was really proud to be, that’s not to say that I’m not now, but when I look around me today, my mind tends to raise a lot of questions about freedom. The dictionary defines the word ‘revolution’ as an overthrow or repudiation and the thorough replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed. Is this the point I’m trying to construct? In some form atleast.

India is changing. It’s been changing for a long time now. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not so much. One of the major changes has been the change in the Indian government over the years since independence. At the time of independence, wise leaders put forth a constitution that would in coming years form a perspective, based on which future India would command itself. They were bright, knowledgeable men who risked their lives to give us freedom. To give us the right to live by our own rules. Is this the way they wanted it to turn out? They wanted their descendants to live with freedom. Yes, freedom. Freedom to express our feelings, freedom against discrimination. I look around myself and see that is not really happened. Has it? Social, economic and religious discrimination has become commonplace in our country today.

Several brave men gave their lives for our freedom. We should be proud in reminiscence. A great revolutionary once said, “how can I feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?”. This applies to me as it seems to be. How can I feel proud of their accomplishments, considering I haven’t really been able to experience the fruits of their labor? They wanted me to live in a free India, a place where freedom meant something; where freedom meant you never had to live in fear. Fear, that brings us to another topic altogether. As common men in a country over-run by swashbuckling, power-wielding politicians, do we not feel a sense of uncontrollable fear? An administration that runs itself on whims and fancies of unaccountable leaders who continue to cause distress among the already burdened bourgeoisie, so that they can experience comforts that we can’t even dream of? A judiciary that tries as much as it can to keep the control going, but at some time will crumble at our feet to yield a state of anarchy.

The police are mere puppets, or rather more like a set of rampant tyrants, who hold the law in their own hands and more often than not, twist it to their own advantage. They tend to get auctioned off to the largest bidder. Traffic is controlled by a set of incompetent, largely unhealthy officers who very often create more trouble than there already is. We’ve all experienced this sometime in our lives haven’t we? But we know enough about police misconduct for me to continue on these lines.

The lawmakers themselves tend to make laws based on their own benefit. The reservations law for example. The law was brought about among widespread public agitation against it. So much for freedom of speech. Police brutality against those who tried to speak against the law, also speaks volumes about the way this was conducted. When the reservations were initially brought forward by an insightful Ambedkar, he wished them to uplift the ailing lower castes, to bring them to a respectable social level, wherein they could stand toe-to-toe with other better endowed classes of the society. It was to be run for a short frame of time. This didn’t happen. It continues rampantly today, and we see that upper-caste individuals, no matter how economically depressed, no matter how intellectually gifted, are pushed back by less deserving candidates who just wield lower-caste certificates. Is that what we’ve been brought to? A world where people justify educational qualifications by supplying a complementary caste-certificate?

Isn’t that the total opposite of what Ambedkar would have wanted? To justify his claim for increased reservations (to reserve nearly 75% of seats in all educational institutions for the socially repressed), Arjun Singh went on to state that according to a census taken sometime in the past, nearly 80% of India’s population belonged to the OBC (other backward classes) tag. Let me calculate, so according to that, wouldn’t that make us so-called Brahmins the minority? And aren’t the minority supposed to given reservations so that they can improve economic and social standing?

A lot of questions. How can these be answered? By a revolution? Are we rebellious, mutinous, revolutionary? Che Guevara, who most of you must know, once said “What is a revolution without guns?” Is this necessarily true? To note a point from history, the erstwhile Aztec civilization of the valley of Mexico were free set of people who lived by their own rules. They lived in solitude, in peace. Their arts, crafts, agriculture flourished and they lived comfortably amongst their own. Until though the gun-wielding Spanish conquistadors turned up. Led by Hernan Cortez, these conquistadors totally decimated a race of people that did not much know of wars and battle. This may be unrelated to the topic being discussed but it holds some importance to the argument I’m trying to make.

When we think of a revolution in India, we think of the non-violent independence struggle of India, but do we tend to forget the thousands of armed rebels who played their part in bringing about independence? Or do we just remember the parts our history books told us about? Yes, changing of history books, another point I’m not really willing to discuss at the moment, but one of utmost importance in today’s argument.

What do we do to fight injustice against us in our own country? A country where we were meant to live with freedom. Is a revolution the answer? Another question I don’t know how to answer! The world is changing, will we continue to let us be left behind? A revolution? Against whom? The lot that run our country? Who are they, aren’t they really commonplace Indians just like you and me? Do we continue to live with the injustice saying “jaane de, you can’t fight the system”. Everyone’s heard that at some point in their lives, haven’t they?

The latitudes of silence. Silence speaks a thousand words say wise men, pity I can’t figure out what it’s saying!