“Equality, happiness for all should be our goal”
Vidyadhar Date is a senior journalist and was with the Times of India in Mumbai for over 30 years. He is the author of the just published book Traffic in the era of climate change which critically looks at the automobile-dominated pattern of development, the marginalisation of the common people and seeks a lively street culture where people enjoy dignity and fellow feeling. |
I am a patriotic Indian and I am even proud to be an Indian. But having said that I must say that a true patriot should be the first to criticise the wrong policies of his or her government. As the eminent thinker Noam Chomsky has pointed out it would be very unpatriotic of an American not to oppose America’s war in Iraq.
Some people have very strange ideas about being patriotic and about the development of our nation. If one opposes some so called development project one is condemned as unpatriotic, even a traitor, even if the project overruns adivasis and their land and destroys the environment.
I am a member of the Pakistan India Forum for Peace and Democracy, an organisation of very decent, democratic people on both sides of the border. But some people raise their eye brows when they hear this and think it is almost being anti-Indian to want to have friendship with Pakistan. And some are also surprised that I visited Pakistan for a conference of this organisation in 2003 in Karachi. To be a true Indian you are expected by some people to hate Pakistan.
That is sad. I think we should love the people of our country and other countries. I am very critical of many policies of the Pakistani establishment. But people everywhere are basically nice and there should be people to people contact. There is nothing unpatriotic about it.
As a leftist, I was attracted to the Soviet Union during the cold war era. I was a journalist in the Times of India for many years. But when a Russian asked me over dinner some years ago to work for him, I declined politely and firmly. That is because I and my soul are not for sale. I believe in an ideology but this cannot be traded.
It is possible to be an internationalist and at the same time to be true to one’s country. Be true to thine own self, as Shakespeare said. The logic behind the slogan ‘Workers of the World Unite, you have nothing to lose but chains’ is very good. But countries which ruled in the name of Communism did not do a very good job in promoting this. China represses its workers most severely in a blatant betrayal of Marxist ideas.
We should realise our strengths and not make the same mistakes made by the West or blindly follow false ideas of development. India withstood the economic crisis because of our restraint on foreign capital and because of our regulation of the economy. But many people in high places simply want to sell the country to imperialists, to put it in rather simple terms. Their patriotism is seldom doubted. Mahatma Gandhi is our great strength. He is the most relevant in many ways. His views on simplicity, decentralisation, environment are most precious at this time when the whole earth is threatened by climate change. This threat has arisen mainly because of the bankrupt Western capitalist model.
We should be very wary of grand sounding ideas like India becoming a super power, world class and that sort of stuff. It is very deceptive, even insulting to talk in these terms when people do not have basic facilities like water, food, health care and housing. The agenda of these people is quite different. Let us give people basics then talk of becoming a superpower etc.
Attaining equality, happiness for all should be our goal. It may be difficult to achieve but it is desirable. We must dream the impossible. We must at least have our ideals right, only then can we act correctly. The current path of development leading to growing inequalities is dangerous. The rise of the Naxalite movement in answer to this shows there are serious flaws in this model of development.
We talk with pride about being Indians but we have colonised the lands of poor people in our own country, taken away their livelihood, their rivers, water, farms, even their mountains. All this is done in the name of development and to make India a strong nation. I do not want to become strong at the expense of someone else, especially the poor.
Our best guides on this are two texts, Rabindranath Tagore’s on nationalism in 1917 and Mahatma Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj of 1910. Both were prophetic and are highly relevant. Tagore warned that economic and political forces should not be allowed to overrun common people in the name of the Nation. Gandhiji was against a centralised, monolithic State that enslaved, alienated people. He warned against the corrupting influence of political power. Their vision is very true and relevant.