India: 60 years of Independence

Two days from now, India will celebrate sixty years of independence and the world’s largest democracy is talking about little else these days. While Bollywood movies like this one tickle the patriotic nerve and young boys eagerly push cloth flags into the faces of car drivers at traffic junctions, the newspapers are flooded with retrospective columns and reports. You can read about the sixty momentous events that made India including historic landmarks like the India-Pakistan wars, Indira Gandhi’s ascension to power and the IT revolution. There’s also the sixty most successful men and women and sixty years of filmmaking. Yes, the ’sixty’ theme will be done to death in the next few days.

Landmark dates are usually accompanied by a host of chronicles, report cards, and nostalgic reveries. And why not? It’s as good a time as any to look back and see what a country has achieved–and what it hasn’t. This columnist points to some of the hard-won successes that dot India’s trajectory.

Culturally, there isn’t (thank god) a “national culture” in place, but there’s a confidence amongst the citizens of the republic that being “Indian” is easy. The film industries that dot every part of the country are vulgarly healthy, our upmarket discos play bhangra, our haute couture is hideous but popular, our art has invented a market for itself, our television industry proliferates and Indian audiences remain relatively indifferent to foreign programming.

Our newspapers continue to expand and prosper and compete: Unlike America, where the newspaper readership of whole cities is virtually owned by single papers—The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, etc. Our writers are better paid now, their books better produced and their publishing houses more entrepreneurial. Which Indian writer would be nostalgic for the bad old days when being published meant Hind Pocket Books or Jaico?

Intellectually and academically, India has a sense of self that Pakistan or Malaysia or Indonesia don’t. Academic publishing for an Indian market has struck roots and while its quality is variable, it has the great merit of creating a body of work that examines aspects of Indian society and history that might be of little interest to foreign readers but are vitally important for us.

While the tone is relentlessly gung-ho for the most part, there are some dissenters who point towards India’s problems–corruption in its government, poverty among its millions and lack of personal freedoms–and ask the question “whence freedom?”

This columnist asks some tough questions:

At a time when we measure the quality of justice on the basis of a Bollywood star being sentenced for an acknowledged misdemeanor, and the media continues to obsess about Sanjay Dutt, how he feels, what he eats, how he sleeps in Yeravada jail even as thousands of undertrials rot in our jails for years, even decades, without anyone hearing about them leave alone worrying about the conditions under which they survive, we have to ask ourselves whether we have deliberately chosen to ignore reality. Growing older should not mean becoming blind, even if myopia is a physical condition that sometimes increases with age.

So does this one:

Across the country, law and order is a joke, and our government fattens itself on the sweat of a billion people. Free speech is endangered and censorship thrives. Honest men wishing to start a business that will fulfil the needs of others—as all businesses must in order to survive—find themselves having to deal with licences and inspectors.

The price of freedom, it is often said, is eternal vigilance. We let our guard down 60 years ago. Perhaps it’s time to fight back?

Meanwhile, even amid the celebrations, violence mars the landscape. In the north-eastern state of Assam, rebels have killed 13 people and wounded another 15. But this is unlikely to dampen the spirit in the rest of this vast country. Despite all the frustration and cynicism, most Indians still feel an immense amount of pride at their nationhood and much of this will be on glorious tri-coloured display in the next few days.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 3:20 am and is filed under Remembering Now. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.