The Destiny that is Different
It was a Golden Jubilee without much of a jubilation. There was little cheer and virtually no stirring among bulk of that billion who constitute this great nation. It cannot but be so. They have no reason to be happy about the path along which their ‘destiny’, the devilish destiny guided by the bourgeoisie, had taken them in the past fifty years. Hence they have no reason to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the tryst that was entered into in their name by the latter. For those ‘children of the midnight’ who fought valiantly for the country’s freedom it was plain despair. It cannot be otherwise. They didn’t fight just to see the Britishers off.
Their yearning for democracy stands totally belied. Their every conceivable democratic right, as well as that of their progenies, in independent India has been trampled much the same way as under the aliens. By a gargantuan sized bureaucratic-military machine at the beck and call of the bourgeois and the feudal and all other reactionary scum. The First Citizen of the country, in his midnight message, calls upon the commoner to fight corruption and the ‘hapless’ Premier, who till the other day shielded a super scamster to the last ditch from the public wrath, repeats the same at Red Fort the next morning. And that is democracy for you in ‘free’ India!
The second sordid treachery of the bourgeoisie was over secularism. Even the holocaust of partition left the nation only in deep convulsion and sorrow. It didn’t cause a mass upsurge in militant Hinduism. This saffron surge came about much later: with which bourgeoisie compromised at every step and promoted actively. The rightwing consolidation was the ultimate fallback and prop for its tottering class rule.
The very same class which symbolically burnt foreign goods in its swadeshi crusade and then robbed the masses to the last rupee to build a ‘socialism’ catering to its own coffers, now lay prostrate before the multinational capital. Even the nation’s tribune, the Parliament, had the 50th birthday bash sponsored by Cadbury Schweppes. The nation’s other half — the poor and the hungry — is now larger in number than in 1947.
There were other fragments to the Indian dream which too have been shattered to smithereens. After bringing in a bill to empower women the Parliament gets seized in a paroxysm of male chauvinism. Gandhi’s ‘Children of the God’ are gunned down in their hundreds by upper caste private armies. And the less privileged among various peoples of the land who united to form the oneness of India fighting against the British are even to date, after fifty long years, struggling to take their affairs, if not their destiny, into their own hands.
The bourgeoisie today are a demoralised lot. They have lost their sense of destiny — even as a modern, secular, bourgeois nation. Their ideologues chip in to pep up the mood by giving themselves generous marks — 50:50. Successes and failures in equal measure. Yet their celebrations ring hollow. Fifty years may be too long a period. But the proletariat and its party cannot forget that the day of freedom from the foreign rule also marked the day it lost the first round of battle to the bourgeoisie. The tide however is turning. The second round is still on. The proletariat too has its own destiny: the battle for democracy, and from thereon to socialism.