January 26th, 2003
26th January was declared India’s Independence Day with great hope and idealism over seventy years ago. The year was 1929. On the midnight of 29th December, the President of the Indian National Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru, unfurled the tiranga or tricolour for the first time and declared 26th January 1930 as Independence Day. The occasion was used to make manifest the country’s resolve for full and complete Independence and not Dominion Status or any other form which implied any limitation whatsoever to Liberty. This was on the banks of the Ravi in Lahore.
Jawaharlal declared: –
The flag under which you stand today and which you have just saluted does not belong to any one community…. All under the flag are Indians… not Hindus not Muslims but Indians… Now that the flag has been unfurled it must not be lowered as long as a single man woman or child lives.
The tiranga’s colours are saffron white and green. Various explanations have been given in interpretation of the significance and meaning of each of the three colours in the flag. For some the flag represents a mélange or coming together of all the inhabitants of India, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis; the growing numbers of Buddhists and all the others.
Another school assigns Saffron to the Hindus and Green to the Muslims with the central white band representing all the colours taken together accomodating the Christians and other communities inhabiting the country.
One school would like more space in the flag for saffron at the expense of the green! Yet another would interpret saffron as the symbol of self sacrifice, white as the emblem of purity and green as that of abundance.
Seven decades have passed since that first unfurling of the tricolour. At Independence the charkha or spinning wheel gave way to the chakra taken from the Dharma symbolism of Ashoka the Mauryan Emperor of the fourth century B.C.
The tricolour with the chakra was adopted as the national flag of Independent India.
It immediately became government property and the Indian citizen without official position or rank could not fly it except under various restrictive conditions. A PIL, ‘public interest litigation’, has, quite recently, freed the flag and it can be flown without let or hindrance from the intrusive agents of the ubiquitous modern state.
This victory has not seen an enthusiastic rush for buying the flag and making arrangements to fly it from the rooftops of homes or the front wall of offices.
The attack on the USA on 11th September 2000 saw many more flags fluttering in American suburbia. Perhaps because the US is peopled largely by immigrants who need to assert their ‘americanness’. As Hindutva grows more and more frenetic and hysterical it is possible that more and more of the Muslims the Christians and Parsis of India will assert their Indianness by flying the tricolour.
Perhaps less Hindus will do so. The Hindus are more and more influenced by the RSS. The RSS never fought under this flag or for the independence of India. Savarkar hated the Indian National Congress as much as Sir Saiyyad Ahmad. He had a personal vendetta against Mahatma Gandhi and was an accused at the trial following the assassination on 30th January 1948.
As the RSS have tens of thousands of branches (shaakhaas) where they salute the bhagwaa pennant every morning the idea of flying the tricolour at home or in the office will not readily appeal to their saffronised minds.
There is also the fact of globalisation. Nationalism is becoming weaker everywhere in the world. This has had a positive effect as the French the English and the Germans are all friends amongst themselves and with each other. Perhaps a lessening of ‘nationalism’ will make people in Pakistan and India realize that their mutual animosity and distrust suits only others who can manipulate them to serve their own purposes. For the poor countries of Pakistan and India animosity with each other only means supporting war machines which eat up all the national revenues and make corruption possible in the defense ministries and services at a mind boggling level.
Indians are aware of the outside world as never before. Awareness does not mean understanding as the consciousness is not academic and intellectual but driven by consumer advertising and political propaganda.
Everyone wants to affect a USAmerican lifestyle. All areas of life such as food, clothes, music, dance, literature and even love styles are increasingly dominated by US models. The media power of the USA U.K. Israel combine can be seen in the daily growth of the number of people who support Bush on Iraq. In contrast Zimbabwe gets a bad press. No one blames the U.K. for the mess they have left in Zimbabwe by not honouring the assurances they had given for resettling the white farmers. All such parasites were abolished in India after independence by laws such as the Zamindari Abolition Acts. When Mugabe tries to effect an equitable redistribution of Zimbabwe’s land he gets no support in India.
Sympathy for the Palestinians hardly exists in India. Perhaps because the victims of Israel are Muslims and the government of India and its propaganda machine is busy with a ‘blame the victim’ programme especially after the success of the Gujarat experiment as demonstrated in the election results.
It is as if no one can see that the Hindutva propagated by the RSS/VHP/BJP rulers is taking India into the same civil war kind of situation as exists in Palestine.
The quest of the existing and wannabe elite is for education enabling migration, the winning of a green card and getting into the long and winding queue to become a U.S. citizen. With the weight being placed increasingly on losing the Indian nationality what price the tricolour? Will it also, like Lahore, become alien.
Perhaps in times to come people will repeat Ghalib’s verse
‘ Time was when we remembered the joys of colourful assemblies
All of those have now been relegated to the alcove of forgetfulness’
Yaad thheen humkoa bhee rungaarung buzmaaraaiyaan
Leykin sub nuqshoanigaarey taaqey nissiyaan hoa gayeen!