Nationalism is expansion of the heart in sympathy with all and antipathy towards none. Crime cannot be resisted by harbouring hatred towards any but by robust abiding of law by a vast section of the polity that will marginalise the evil elements, and by an equal enforcement of the rule of law by the powers that be. Above all the culture of the country must be raised by introducing a rational and scientific curriculum instead of a jingoistic archaic one with religious reflections that will for sure reduce our future fortunes as a nation to nought by taking us back along a regressive route to the dark days of antiquity from where we have evolved unto modernity marked by unprecedented progress in science.
So far as ethics and spirituality are concerned, these may be taught in parallel establishments run privately and without government funding. The state must be strictly secular in the truest Indian sense and not in the European original connotation of the word which is atheistic and anti-religion. The import of the word applicable to India ought to be that the state will be equally favourable to all religious denominations and not specially to any one, even for the sake of wooing voters, an act which must be punishable by law.
A modern state alone can withstand modern pressures of governance and foreign affairs. As such it has to be entirely scientific in approach which itself is quite a spiritual thing to do for our Sanatan Dharma enjoins upon us exactly that sort of an attitude of enquiry and action. Hence, there is no divorce as such between science and spirituality as Indians have always understood it.
So, let us be scientific for a change and give up all these archaic appendages of pseudo-spirituality that have grown on our body politic in recent times. Unto such an enlightened national living let us dedicate our efforts and bring up our children to be worthy inheritors of all that we hold dear and all that we shall bequeath unto them as well through our present endeavours.
Written by Sugata Bose
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