[ Started writing an article on India’s 61^st Independence.  Lost interest half way.   Below is half complete article.  Interested can read at leisure ]

Proceedings of recent time have left me disillusioned.  Uncurbed inflation, cowardice acts of terrorism, violence in J & K, shameful political drama are just one too many more than I can recount have left me perplexed trying to find ‘how long India can exist in politically unity?’  I thought to have become amalgamated into the Indian thinking fabric of defeatism, pessimism and false ego.

At this time of the hour Ambedkar’s word 60 years ago is more true than it was then.

Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment.  It has to be cultivated.  We must realize that our people have yet to learn it.  Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.

-          B. R. Ambedkar

All my doubts are not without valid reasons.  Are we nation of skeptics?  Until freedom left liberalist wished for British imperialism to continue; since Independence, for 40 years, we hoped in vain for USSR to build India; last 20 years, are we hoping on United States to develop India?

For it to be appropriate, who could write such an article as ‘India @ 61’?  Politician? Journalist? Scholar? Westerner? If alive, Gandhi? Nehru? Is when I realized if such was to be written it must more appropriate by common folk of the nation.  Whence started writing ‘India @ 61’.  What was I to write? Should it be an account of progress and fallback, about strength and weakness, about valor and defeat, about greatness and embarrassment, about culture and religion, about secularism and communalism, about diversity and unity? This would merely reduce it to a historian’s account of India as journalist.  So I deliberated to write from ideological perspective through my mind’s eye.

I was to understand what is India? – ‘India is just a geographical expression .  it is only the British who united it.  We aren’t even one nation – for a nation must have one language, one religion, one race’ – how often have we heard this? So what is real India? - And I found it from Nehru’s ‘Discovery of India’.  It is a five thousand years long continuity of cultural expression that is India.  It is a thousands of years of history of invasion and upheaval, a tradition which was widespread among the masses and powerfully influenced them.  Starting with ‘The Indus civilization’ – which represents a very perfect adjustment of human life to a specific environment that can only have resulted from years of patient effort.  And it has endured; it  is already specifically Indian and forms the basis of modern Indian culture.

Astonishing as it was that any culture or civilization should have this continuity for five or six thousand years or more; and not in a static, unchanging sense, for India was changing and progressing all the time.  These were the men who seemed to know life and understand it, and out of their wisdom they had built a structure which gave India a cultural stability which lasted for thousands of years.  It is the people of this nation are India – no cast, no creed and no religion 

India’s Strength and Weakness – 19^th through mid 20^th century while western world was advancing India fell behind in the matters of technique, and Europe, which had long been backward in many matters, took the lead in technical progress.  Behind this technical progress was the spirit of science and a bubbling life and spirit which displayed itself in many activities and adventures voyages of discovery.  New techniques gave military strength to the countries of western Europe, and it was easy for them to spread out and dominate the East.  That is the story not only of India, but of the whole of Asia.

“WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC and to secure to all its citizens:  JUSTICE, social, economic and political; LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; EQUALITY of status and of opportunity; and to promote among them all FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation;”

Today, does this great nation stand up to the preamble of the constitution devised 59 years ago? Where is the security when terrorists are walking free after crime? Where is the equality when there is still no common civil code?  As a common man of this nation what are we to do to uphold the preamble of our constitution and leave up to it?