Remembering The Ghosts Of Past

The transfer of rule of India, 1947

Quiet a long time has passed since that fateful stroke of midnight hour when India became independent. Many generations have come to be since that night and in this due course of time we have witnessed a great leap of hope for future in our country.  We are a generation that has not known bondage like others and this natural feel of independence has had its implications on our world view. Today we expect more from our nation and do so quiet rightly. We aspire to equal and surpass the west and thus often compare all our achievements with theirs. But when we view our failures in some fields and engage in criticism we quiet conveniently ignore the hardships and the history that has brought about this present for our nation.

Surrender of Pakistan, 1972

Ours was not an easy ride. When we started off in the fifties after the chaos of liberation we had found ourselves on shifting sands. We had an non-integrated nation riddled by wounds of partition and plagued by centuries of regionalism. The greatest worry of our government was the disintegration of the state not to mention the widespread poverty, illiteracy, famine etc. Socialist policies of Nehru Ji didn’t help much either but through the decade he managed to keep our young nation from falling apart.

Indira Gandhi in Pokhran following nuclear tests, 1974

After the war of 1962 was lost, as if to manifest the nation’s state, our then Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri had severe heart attack. Through the decade our country struggled to manage food security until after much effort the green revolution was brought about.  In the following decade Smt. Indira Gandhi turned us to the Russians for support during the 1971 war. Following this we conducted the operation Smiling Buddha (Pokhran 1) and multitudes of sanctions were imposed on us and some of them were not revoked until 2002. Indira ji went on to force socialism on the country and we ended up in a political turmoil.

Seventies were also the decade when the secessionist movements rose to great heights in our country with problems in Punjab and the North East. The Naxal movement which persists even today is a child of those times. Then the assassination of Smt. Gandhi in 1984 saw the rise of riots. Mr. Rajiv Gandhi took over after her mother and in his reign we faced turmoil because of the Sri Lankan peace force episode.

The early nineties saw the economic fall out of the country as Soviet Union, on which we were greatly dependent, collapsed. While the rise of small regional parties brought in an era of coalition governments, riots based on religion were also a dominant theme in the decade and it was not until the beginning of this millennium that we saw some stability in the country.

India has progressed despite all the hardships and this is not an excuse. We have every right to be unsatisfied with the work not done and to point out that every nation that stands has had its fair share of troubles. My intention in this post was not to overwhelm you with history. My only intention behind this article is to point out that there is a long past behind what is, and being critical of today without knowing yesterday is the most unfair thing we can do to the memory of our predecessors.

I remember watching an old Bengali movie once when I was very young. The memory is in patches and this is as much as I recall. It featured the story of a village focusing on the family of a school master and his wife during our 1962 war with China. The movie showed how the teacher was unable to manage even a fistful of rice to feed his wife as there was a shortage of food all over. In hunger they had to try every way to manage food. His young wife eventually had to involve in a physical relationship with a resourceful person to feed her family. The movie captured the true desperation of the time and left a great impact on my young mind. I urge us to never be forgetful of those days.

Further Reading:
Wikipedia: Brief history of post independence India