VANDE MATARAM ... 10

VANDE MATARAM ... 10

The intellectual life of India must be saved. Liberty must be pursued on all fronts and especially in the realm of thought. Freedom of thinking and expression is being curtailed these days and we must resist such oppressive measures in the name of nationalism. The judiciary must stand free to dispense with justice and safeguard the rights of citizens.

A constricted civic life can scarce ensure civilisational growth. Hence, the individual must be protected from the party's predatory manoeuvres and his voice allowed free utterance in the public domain for democracy to subsist in right earnest.

Regressive nationalism is dangerous for the polity and needs to be checked by enlightened civic participation in the in the domain of democratic discourse. This can only be ensured by intellectuals uniting in giving utterance to their views irrespective of authoritarian resistance to such free expression.

The press and the electronic media have declined in recent years to becoming passive supporters of the government or active sycophants benefiting from popular subscription to their views. This has spelled the doom of not only democratic opposition to the government in more robust terms by quickening contrary public opinion but has dealt intellectual life the deathblow.

How can a country so steeped in reactionary politics, so mired in acquisitive industry, so deluded by regressive religious revivalism be expected to progress? It is time to make amendments to our mental attitudes, clarifications in our understanding of the nation's history in real dialectical terms and not in propagated nonsensical terms that harp on the same lines characteristic of the ignoramus, and to initiate individual enterprises in illumining the polity as to what is truly good for it. For the successful prosecution of such an enterprise, individuals must enlighten themselves about the nation's history and the dialectics of history itself so that they may guide their countrymen along the right channels of national fulfilment. May men with character, courage of conviction and correctness in comprehension of the historical necessities of the times step in to step up the process of the emancipation of the masses from their material misery !

Written by Sugata Bose