The one hope for our country, the national ideal, Swami Vivekananda lies desecrated, albeit, in stone, days before the unveiling of his statue at Jawaharlal Nehru University. The incident reeks of anti-national sentiment despite the fact that it is apparently an expression of student disapproval of progressive saffronisation of the university campus as also the rest of the country, the merits of which argument is debatable, but it must not be politicised in condemnation neither condoned as a stray act of student misadventure. Swamiji remains our culture's sublimest representative, its brightest exemplar in modern times and, perhaps, of all time, considering the massive sweep of his message and mission. To exhibit irreverence thus is a clear show of contempt for our culture and a manifestation of the subterranean stream of student anger against the existing state of things. This is not an apologia on behalf of the perpetrators of the vandalism committed but is by way of reference to the fact that all is not well in the mental health of our youth.
A political dispensation that revels in the economic growth of our country to the exclusion of consideration enough for the growing disparity in the distribution of wealth between the super-rich and the teeming millions that struggle for their daily bread can hardly bring about a renaissance of Indian culture through cosmetic changes in the facade that they project as India. Capitalism, rooted, and ruinously so, is flourishing in its most brazen mode, reducing millions to man-made poverty. For the progress of science and technology which ought to have wiped the tears of the poor and brought succour to their desecrated lives has only served progressively the decadent interests of the wealthy and been a tool in their hands for the furtherance of the class divide. If in this retrograde order of national development Vivekananda pays the price in terms of monumental desecration, it is but an early symptom of the social revolution that needs must follow to avenge the heresies of history. Perhaps, the tenor of this expanding essay seems strange to the reader who, as yet, has held his patience in reading it, but this is quite the situation we are placed in where rampant exploitation of the masses is acquiring governmental sanction and the interests of the poor are being neglected in inertial flow since decades. All this must lead to human pollution as well, in addition to that of the degrading environment, and its consequence are these sporadic cases of heritage desecration, albeit with increasing frequency. Vivekananda has been forgotten by the powers that be and his desecration in stone merely highlights this monumental neglect in the application of his precepts and principles in the polity at large. And I hold everyone culpable to this offence, not merely the ones who manifestly vandalised the pedestal of the Swami's statue that awaits its unveiling.
Written by Sugata Bose
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