"At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom."
As India listened to Nehru's voice on the midnight of 15th August, 1947, I assume the general (and by general I mean "typical" in statistical terms) mood in the nation must have been one of elation and frenzy. India's umbilical cord had not yet been severed. And no, not just from the British Empire but from its own eternal past. History says that India was being born.
When we think of events preceding a child's birth, what comes to our mind is the care that the mother provides for the unborn. When the new nation state of India was coming into existence, then who was her Mother? Can we imagine a pregnant lady playing soccer just moments before giving birth? How would you interpret the man-made Bengal famine of the 1940s, which starved millions of people to death; the same people who produced the harvest only for it to be shipped off to the "Allied" forces on the European battlefield? A mother does not want to kill her unborn child. A mother is not an imperialist, neither is she a Bourgeois elite.
One might argue that Nehru in his speech only mentioned about India awakening and not about being born; and therefore lobby against my initial line of argument. Of course, I disagree. His speech did mention someone as the "Father of the Nation."
The theme behind this article is simple. There was a crusade at play between three competing powers: Liberalism, Fascism and Communism. Two of these at any point were competing against the third, and it so happened that eventually it was Fascism that was put to sleep. The Liberals were the greater power and they were both power drunk and tired enough to have allowed Fascism to propagate in a huge country like India. So a guy who had flirted with both the Communists and the Fascists would never have been accepted by the Liberals. This is why I argue that India was 'probably' better off without Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose.
I am a Bengali and I strongly believe that India has never produced a stronger spine than Netaji's. A spine's job is not just to hold humans erect, but it also houses the spinal cord; our survival instincts. But as we know, blades sharp enough, can cut through both the spinal cord and the soul. In 1947, the blades pointed at India were quite sharp, and I think Nehru had the fluidity to counter the edges.
What we see today unfolding in Ukraine is exactly what India would have been subjected to if the Bourgeois elite had not been in bed with the Liberal structure. Just to be comprehensive, I refer to the ruling class, the Congress party as the Bourgeois center. The nation state of India bulldozed through the five hundred and eighty four princely states quite simply like an imperial power, and both the Liberals and the Communists let this happen without any hindrance. The only exception is Kashmir, but there had to be a buffer state, as we can understand from the current geopolitics of the world. Had Netaji been in power (as some Indians would like to imagine as an alternate history for themselves), I think the country would have been torn apart by civil war. This is not because Netaji wasn't an able leader, but due to his fascist ideological views. The world had just fought a bloody war, and I strongly believe they were in no mood to let another fascist leader emerge out of a land that harboured deep resentment for anything foreign.
This is what the Indian political establishment knew all too well. The principles on which India was founded reassert this claim. Our constitution if anything, is inward looking. Very rightly our politicians attacked not the symptoms but the deeper lying pathogen - they identified the need for reservations - to hold the new nation together. Our constitution was aimed at liberty, fraternity, equality, and sanctity. We decided not to be an aggressive power, but a defensive one. We decided to build our future by straying away from the rule of might. We were speaking a different language from the rest of the world. We were finally looking deep into our past, and were trying to decode a lost grammar. We defend the right of our state to be sovereign, and then we defend the sovereignty of individuals. In other words, India, the nation, was founded on the ideology of Nationalism, and NOT on Liberalism or Socialism. The Bourgeois elite decided to go on an economic path of social justice, as they thought that that was the only way to earn the trust of the working class. The Naxalite movement that ravaged Bengal a couple of decades later bears testimony to the fact that it was a different (from today) world back then. It would have been impossible to simultaneously maintain peacefully both democracy and capitalism in such a large populous landmass, which had had a long history of slavery. Interestingly, a socialist plunge by the Congress party in the 60s seemed to push the country more towards authoritarianism and this fed strongly back into the Naxalite principles. It is no less than a miracle that democracy in India has not only survived, but is flourishing! It is our constitution that has stood the test of time, and I doubt that the story would have been similar if we ever had a dictator in power.
India has every right of abstaining from giving its view on whatever crisis the world creates. It's not just about " India's interests" , as some would like to say. We, Indians speak a different language - the language of non-alignment - the language of being atmanirbhar . I get that the world finds it difficult to understand our ethos. I laugh then when the same world sings praises of Gandhi. It took smartness more than anything else to rid our land off foreigners, to earn our sovereignty. We are still smart enough to keep it that way.
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