Ideal India

Subject to questioning in various circles the veracity of the narratives in the pages of the land’s history, keeping aside for a moment the multitude of ancient texts presenting countless episodes of mythology, public speakers, both accomplished and the lay sections among them, take pride and feel a sense of fascination in recalling the glory that people of a distant past brought to the land. At least two fields of human endeavour in which they excelled and attributed to them that have endured to this day are undoubtedly Ayurveda and Yoga, without meaning to belittle the many other fields in which they have left an indelible imprint, such as sculpture, music, literary wealth including words of wisdom, statecraft, agriculture, code of conduct through years of human life-span, basics of safeguarding life-supporting resources and so on. Thanks to the many invading hordes that gained entry into the land at different times, first of plundering wealth and later to set shop, several generations of the land’s people lost their bearings and bore the brunt of the consequences of alien rule, a legacy that cannot be missed in today’s scenario.

The pages of the land’s later history, from medieval to modern, with writings of chroniclers of those periods may delight readers. What message those pages convey to subsequent generations is a big question mark. One is prompted to pick the topic of people identifying themselves on different counts, including faiths they follow and ethnicity they cannot hide, resulting in the land far from being ideal.

Two distinct alien visitors to the land, one of them indulging in unbounded brutalities including acts of destruction of shrines and the other charged with practicing divide ‘n’ rule policy have smeared their image in black. Even as the partitioned country came under self-rule seven decades ago, some measures aimed at undoing the wrongs of pre-partition period promised emergence of ideal conditions for unalloyed harmony in society. One such measure with bearing on castes has snowballed into bitterness between different sections in the country’s population. There are all signs of that bitterness feeling with the consequence of perpetuating social division of people, that the land’s politicians are encashing unabashedly.

By sheer hindsight, the aforementioned measure of playing up castes and ignoring action to ensure livelihood to the last citizen, leaving the masses in unending misery, clearly portrays the country’s ruling janta of seven decades ago as a bunch lacking in vision, particularly in the task of achieving ideal India.