THE MEANING OF INDIA

Guest Post By Nayantara Sahgal.

Nayantara Sahgal is the niece of Jawaharlal Nehru and the daughter of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. She writes on the idea of India, which through its deep civilizational roots is attached in its modern form to the Indian freedom struggle. She observed this magnificent struggle, which influenced so many around the world, at close quarters as a child because her parents and extended family participated in it.

She came to study in the United States and spent a few days living with Eslanda Robeson. When she and her sister met Paul Robeson for the first time, he said, “So these are my daughters!” When Ho Chi Minh visited India in 1958, she went to receive him at Bombay and he gave her a souvenir that he signed, “To my dear niece Mme. Nayantara Sahgal.” It is this genuine and close friendship between the darker nations forged in a common struggle against imperialism whose legacy we seek to uphold in the fight for peace today. This necessarily means a return to the values and traditions of the struggle for freedom which so shaped Asia, Africa and Afro-America. – OPP Blog Committee

As a nation India dates from 1947 when this subcontinent became a single political entity for the first time. Earlier it had been regionally ruled by different regional powers until British rule divided it into British India and Maharaja-ruled provinces. In 1947 Britain left India partitioned into India and Pakistan.

The Indian National Congress had been the first political party to demand independence from British rule and to fight for freedom under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. This became a national movement that cut across regions, religions, class, mass, languages and gender, creating a unity above differences and a shared national identity. The parties of the Hindu Right and the Muslim Right took no part in this unifying experience. Both rejected its inclusiveness and based national identity respectively on Hinduism and Islam. Both demanded nations ruled by the majority religion. Pakistan achieved this goal, though its claim that religion was a binding force fell apart when East Pakistan broke free to become Bangladesh. India remained committed to its multi-religious, multi-cultural heritage and chose to be a secular democracy.

After the bloodshed and devastation of the Partition, the Indian government’s overwhelming priority was the restoration of communal harmony. Speaking to a public gathering in 1951, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru pledged, “If anyone raises a hand against another in the name of religion, I shall fight him to the last breath of my life, whether from inside the government, or outside.” Nehru’s passionate declaration was defined in the Indian Constitution as a guarantee to every citizen the right to live, love, believe and worship as he/she pleased. For its chief architect, Bhimrao Ambedkar, liberty and equality were not gifts to be granted, but the birthright of every human being. Ensuring these for his own community – condemned as “untouchable” by caste Hindus – had been his lifelong crusade. It now represented the meaning of India.

The first three governments after independence, led by Nehru, had the immense task of lifting India, drained of wealth and resources by two centuries of British exploitation, out of this condition. An economy designed for British profit had crushed indigenous enterprise. British cloth and other goods flooded India, and the Indian artisan, thrown out of work, faced destitution and starvation. The British Governor-General reported home in 1834 that “the misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. . . The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India.” Ruinous taxation impoverished the peasantry and the 1930’s saw a series of famines. During World War Two Indian grain was diverted to British armies and war zones, a policy that was responsible for the Bengal famine which killed three million Indians in the early 1940’s. That the massive endeavour to set the country on the road to recovery, industrialization and modernization took place in an open society founded on democracy, with no sacrifice of individual freedoms and human rights, made it the first of its kind in history.

The meaning of India now faces extinction under a regime committed, like Pakistan, to rule by the majority religion. Supported by a global climate that has marched backward to religious fundamentalism, the re-rise of fascism, the spread of authoritarian governments, and a shrunken, shrivelled view of identity and nationhood, can the meaning of India survive?

The answer, so far, is that the fight for freedom continues.

A Note On the Author

Nayantara Sahgal is a novelist and commentator on politics and literature. Her family fought for freedom from British rule under Mahatma Gandhi. Her mother, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, served three prison sentences, and her father, Ranjit Sitaram Pandit served four, dying of his fourth imprisonment. She is the niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, and she is now involved in India’s second fight for freedom.