15 AUGUST, 2015

Free we are today and free shall remain for sure, for such is our pledge to our beloved Motherland. When Bengal capitulated in Plassey (Palashi) in 1757, it was the dastardly act of Indian traitors who in conjunction with the unscrupulous British general Robert Clive brought about the political downfall of India. Slowly, through the passage of a century the Britishers established their political mastery over us and despite resistance were able to manipulate our men to keep us in subjugation. Trickery, lies, deceit, diplomacy and valour, all played their respective roles in making the British the colonial masters that they turned out to be with the sole aim of exploiting our resources to the hilt to serve their own vested interests. The Permanent Settlement, the Subsidiary Alliance and the Doctrine of Lapse were so many British ploys to colonize India using 'fair' British means for after all the British were 'gentlemen' and used but 'fair' political means to conquer India that they might 'civilize' India with their Western mode of living and their 'superior' Western culture. Lord Macaulay had in 1836 drawn up a plan of Indian education in the British mould which would make English-educated Indians loyal servants of the British and help perpetuate their reign in India for a very long time to come. Incidentally, 1836 was also the year Sri Ramakrishna was born on the soil of India, perhaps as the defence of India to this alien challenge to India's hoary culture. The nation had unsuccessfully waged the First War of Independence in 1857 and consequently, following the Queen's Proclamation of 1858, come under the rule of the British Crown directly as opposed to the earlier rule of the vicious English East India Company. Four years after the War of 1857, Tagore was born. Two years later was born Vivekananda and six more years were all that India had to wait for the birth of the Mahatma. Ramakrishna had sounded the death-knell of the Britishers with the spiritual renaissance that he heralded at Dakshineshwar. Indian independence had been lost on the soil of Bengal and it was Bengal that led the struggle for freedom.

A spiritual renaissance has always marked the rise of national life in India in every age and this age was no exception. Ramakrishna sounded the bugle and the children of India, unlike the children of Hamlin town who had perished in the sea, all rushed unto freedom. The spiritual resurgence of India invigorated Indians with the fire of the Spirit, deathless, invincible, immortal. The Lectures of Vivekananda from Colombo to Almora upon his triumphant return to India following his world-conquering sojourn in the West awakened India from her age-old slumber and sent the ideas of freedom coursing through her veins which soon bore fruition in the protracted struggle for India's independence. Bengal led the way and unforgettable is the saga of the Bengal revolutionaries that so shook the citadels of British power in India that Lord Curzon had to partition Bengal in 1905 in his bid to debilitate her revolutionary movement. But when the move backfired, Bengal was reunited in 1911 but the British found her too hot a seat for 'peaceful' governance, so they shifted capital from Calcutta to New Delhi. But the shift had taken place in another realm too. Indian consciousness had been awakened and the children of India could now no longer be kept enslaved to alien rule, corrupt to the core that it was. World events such as the two Great Wars undermined the British colonial power and led by stalwarts like Gandhiji and Netaji, India achieved political independence on the 15th of August, 1947. 'At the stroke of the midnight hour when the world slept, India awoke to life and freedom.'

India had lost her freedom through her own Karma and she had to bleed her way through to regain her lost freedom. Millions of lives were lost in the struggle for freedom despite the fact that Gandhiji had led a non-violent struggle. But there were other parallel movements alongside Gandhi's non-violent struggle which were violent in their methods no doubt but no less heroic nor any less patriotic. Netaji's Indian National Army played a seminal role in the liberation of India. But for its heroic advances through the jungles of Burma and even its entry into the Indian soil of Imphal, the Royal Indian Navy might not have revolted against its British masters taking the cue from the the revolting Axis-captured British-Indian soldiers that eventually formed the I.N.A. It was this revolt by the R.I.N. that convinced the British that their time was up in India as the very forces that kept their Raj had turned on them.

A look backward and we see that the British invariably resorted to brutal methods of repression to contain the revolutionary activities of the Indian freedom fighters. Millions of Indians periodically lost their lives in famines created by the British Government's inefficient handling of the Indian economy with their prime objective being the loot of the country's resources. The Bengal famine of 1943 was the most glaring instance of the government's malicious intent when all the food was diverted to the troops fighting the Second World War and artificially famine was created which claimed the lives of 5 million people. Then came the Partition of India, the master-plan of the Britishers to permanently weaken India and create an inimical State in Pakistan to thwart India's growth as a nation. In 1906 with the aim of ruling India by the policy of 'Divide and Rule', the British government had encouraged the formation of the Muslim League Party. Thereafter, they had encouraged and patronized divisive politics among the different Indian parties along communal lines to keep the Indians disunited. But when the devastation of the Second World War had put paid to the British dream of a permanent settlement in India, they, true to their vicious national character, used their diabolical means to dismember India as their final act of 'fairplay and British justice', their 'gratitude' to the Indians for all the wealth they had looted from their coffers including the Kohinoor diamond. And who can recount the horrors of Partition that followed! Some 20 million people lost their lives in the riots, disease and starvation that followed in the wake of Partition as whole populations got displaced from their homelands in Bengal and Punjab which had been dismembered. A whole generation of Indians was sent to penury and despair by the transference of population across the Indo-Pak border. Since then the two nations, brothers once, nay, the same body and soul, have fought three wars in 1965, 1971 which led to the turbulent creation of the State of Bangaladesh and 1999 when the Kargil War was fought. The Bangaladesh War took the lives of millions of erstwhile East Pakistanis with hundreds of thousands of their women-folk's modesty being outraged by the invading, marauding Pakistani soldiers. Besides, cross-border terrorism and shelling since 1947 has cost us the loss of hundreds of thousands of Indian soldiers. Both India and Pakistan are victims to violent acts of terrorism almost on a routine basis. All this is the collective Karma of our nation, of Indians tormenting Indians till we became so weak that we fell to foreign hands to debase us further and impair us perhaps for a long time yet to come. The vaunted British Empire has been destroyed by the ravages of the Second World War. Each side must account for its own Karma from which it seems there is no way out. But knowing that we are a single human family, may we start rebuilding our hopes and aspirations of a renascent future for humanity on the ashes of the dead past? May we bury our differences of the past and through a clearer vision of the oneness of the humankind build a new civilization where neither will man be predator nor will he be the prey for, after all, that is 'the way of all flesh' and not of the Infinite Spirit that seeks freedom, justice and light for all? May all the nations of the world celebrate this golden occasion of the 69th birthday of India by taking a pledge they shall honour, that of peaceful co-existence, knowing harmony to be the law of civilized living and unity in diversity to be the basic mantra that animates all of creation! Jai Hind!