Realising the Indian Dream

By

Randeep Wadehra

India’s economic restructuring has started the process of integrating the economy with the emerging international economic order, unleashing indigenous genius in diverse fields of economic activity. So much so that, driven by its success in the IT industry, our economy’s traditional primary, secondary and tertiary sectors have perked up too. However, it is increasingly being felt that a new credo, which is appropriate to the nascent globalized milieu, ought to replace conventional ideologies and isms as they are fast becoming obsolete. Therefore, we must examine the Indian polity’s present health. Is it dynamic enough to warrant confidence in its enduring stability, so essential for enabling India take its rightful place in the emerging international power hierarchy?

Spiraling social unrest, epitomized by Naxalism, caste wars, sub-cultural turmoil and sectarian violence, is a tough poser, alas! One wishes, like the economy, it was fairly feasible to streamline our society too.

Since independence, our collective national psyche has been suffering from schizophrenia of sorts. On the one hand we unstintingly approved a secular constitution sans state religion, and on the other, the body-politic is being wracked by partisan unrest of the worst possible kind. And, let’s not forget the sense of alienation that our compatriots in the Northeast feel vis-à-vis the rest of India, leading to insidious insurgency. Over the years, India’s secular-social fabric hasn’t just frayed at the edges, but has developed gaping holes all over it. Terrorism and group conflicts have become endemic. Forces of obscurantism are doing their worst to subvert the emergence of a liberal post-modern milieu.

The grand Gandhian vision of a genuinely tolerant polity has been reduced to a pathetic platitude mouthed by dishonest politicians, even as they do their worst to tear apart the traditional composite culture. Obviously things have gone terribly wrong somewhere, the reasons for which need to be investigated.

Aware of the extremely complex social stratification in India, the makers of our constitution made every effort to give it a cast-iron secular character. Through a series of provisions that protect the rights of various minorities and other vulnerable groups, they sought to separate religion from the state, and keep the former confined to ecclesiastical sphere so that it doesn’t take on a militant theocratic form. Nehruvian secularism, inspired by the atheist Soviet system, ensured that India didn’t have a state religion.

It exemplified the majority community’s self-confidence when it repeatedly kept the Jana Sangh – and its later day incarnations – out of power for more than four decades after the blood-spattered partition. That self-confidence appears to have been dented now. Hindus are becoming increasingly susceptible to the extremist propaganda that they’re second class citizens in their own country. Over a period of time, successive generations of Hindus have begun to feel that their secular outlook is being taken as a sign of timidity. Aggressive posturing by minority communities appears to have tacit support from assorted political parties, which cynically treat different strata of the society as their respective vote banks. The Sangh Parivar too doesn’t miss any opportunity to exploit the ‘appeasement of minorities by the centre’ to broaden its base among educated middle-class Hindus. Sections of Hindu community – buffeted by the crosscurrents of antagonistic attitudinizing of minorities and the Hindutva propaganda – are losing poise, giving militancy a fillip. Conversely, the minorities feel threatened by the renascent Hindu assertiveness.

The Muslim community is still in search of a

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