On August 15,2022, India celebrated 75 years of its independence. What should be a moment of celebration and joy has become a moment of deep despair and reflection..
We are 75, but are we mature?
On August 15, 2022, India celebrated 75 years of its independence. What should be a moment of celebration and joy has become a moment of deep despair and reflection. On August 15, 1947, India offered a beacon of hope—a multi-everything, secular society choosing democratic governance and a Gandhian vision of inclusion and tolerance. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of India’s ‘tryst with destiny,’ and the hope was that the country would live up to the dream of its only Nobel Laureate for literature, Rabindranath Tagore when he wrote the famous lines “Where the mind is without fear, ‘…. Where the world has not been broken into fragments by narrow domestic walls … into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.”
But in reality, India retained many colonial-era laws that restricted freedoms and, over the years, added more such laws, undermining its democracy. An internal Emergency in 1975 curtailed civil liberties and jailed dissidents. Even after 75 years, India is witnessing brutality by armed forces and the police against its citizens, as well as periods of horrific violence along caste and communal divides.
The election in 2014 has transformed India into a country where hate speech is expressed and disseminated loudly; where Muslims are discriminated against and lynched, their homes and mosques bulldozed, their livelihoods destroyed; where Christians are beaten and churches attacked; where political prisoners are held in jail without trial. Dissenting journalists and authors are denied permission to leave the country. The institutions that can defend India’s freedoms—its courts, parliament, civil service, and much of the media—have been co-opted or weakened. In recent years, India has seen an acceleration of threats against free speech, academic freedom, and digital rights, and an uptick in online trolling and harassment. I am writing this piece as an act of love. I was born in independent India, and I love my country with all my being. But this country that I love is facing the gravest threat to its democracy since its founding.
Indian democracy is one of the 20th century’s greatest achievements. Over 75 years, we built, against great odds, a nation that for the first time in its 5000-year history empowered women and the Dalits, people formerly known as untouchables. We largely abolished famine. We kept the army out of politics. After independence, many people predicted that we would become Balkanized. Yugoslavia and Indonesia became Balkanized, but India stayed together.
But I write this today to tell you: that things in our beloved motherland are more dire than you realize. India is a country that is majority Hindu, but it is not officially a Hindu state. The people who are in power in India today want to change this. They want India to be a Hindu theocratic state, where all other religions live by Hindu sufferance. This has practical consequences: people of other religions are actively harassed, even lynched on the streets; their freedom to practice their religion in their own way is circumscribed. And when they protest, they are jailed and their houses bulldozed. There is also sustained and systematic harassment of writers, journalists, artists, activists, religious figures—anyone who questions the official narrative. We who have attached our names here are taking a great personal risk in writing this: our citizenship of India could be revoked, we could be banned from the country, our property in India seized, and our relatives harassed. There are many others who think like we do but have told us they can’t speak out, for fear of the consequences. I never thought I’d use the word ‘dissident’ in describing myself and my friends who’ve compiled this document; I thought that word only applied to the Soviet Union, North Korea, and China.
It is crucial that India remains a democracy for all its citizens. India is not Pakistan, Iran, or Afghanistan. At least, not yet. A lot of India’s standing in the world—the reason we’re included in the respectable nations, the reason our people and our tech companies are welcome all over the world—is that we’re seen, unlike, say, China, as being a multiethnic democracy that protects its minorities.
With over 200 million Indian Muslims, India is the third-largest Muslim country in the world. There are 30 million Indian Christians. There are Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Zoroastrians, Atheists. They are as Indian as I am—a Hindu who’s proud of being a Hindu, but not a Hindu as Narendra Modi and the BJP seek to define me.
When countries safeguard the rights of their minorities, they also safeguard, as a happy side effect, the rights and well-being of their majorities. If a judiciary forbids discrimination against, say, Muslims, it is also much more likely to forbid discrimination against, say, LGBT people. The reverse is also true: when they don’t safeguard the rights of their minorities, every other citizen’s rights are in peril.
The alienation of Indian Muslims would be catastrophic, for India and the world. They are being told: You are invaders, this is not your country, go back to where you came from. But Indian Muslims did not come from elsewhere; they were in the country all along and chose which God to worship. After the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, they voted with their feet; they chose to stay and build a nation.
The challenges facing India in the next 75 years are colossal, perhaps even greater than the first 75 years. This year, northern India saw the hottest temperatures in history, reaching 49 degrees Celsius (120F). Next year looks to be even hotter. By the middle of the century, New Delhi could become uninhabitable.
The country also has an enormous, restive, and largely unemployed youth population—half of its population is under 25. But only 36% of the working-age population has a job. To meet these challenges, it is crucial that the country stay united, and not fracture along religious lines, spend its energies building a brighter future instead of darkly contemplating past invasions.
In this time when country after country is turning its back on democracy, India has to be an example to countries around the world, this beautiful dream of nationhood is expressed in the Hindu scriptures as ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’—the whole earth is a family.
