The Holiness of Vande Mataram

My wife thinks I am an over-confident and brash busybody. Perhaps I need to try to change the way I come across. That, however, is not what this blog is about. But it is related.

Assuming that I am opinionated about everything under the sun, she asks me what I think of the Deoband Muslim seminary meet that asks Muslims to stop singing Vande Mataram because it is anti-Islamic. The context of course, is that she thinks that I am unpatriotic and do not love my country. The evidence she cites to support her theory, is my opinion that our country has failed both naxalite-supportive communities and Muslims.

Therefore she is surprised when I say that I have not thought about the issue deeply enough.But as soon as I say that I have not thought about this issue, the gears of my mind begin to turn inadvertently. I begin to think aloud - my wife providing bored audience. Here goes my boring case.

In examining this case, we need to sepeate the idea of the National Song from the National Song itself and try to understand what is it that the Seminary opposed. Secondly, we also need to examine whether the form of protest that the Seminary adopted was appropriate.

The Importance of being Ordinary

It begins at infancy - the great Indian quest for becoming a Sahib. Happened with me too.

बेटा IIT वगैरह सब अपने जगह पर हैं. IAS का पॉवर ही कुच्छ और है. IAS बनो तुम। (Son, IIT is good but not great. The power enjoyed by IAS officers is in a different league. Be an IAS officer.)

You grow up seeing Sahibism prevalent everywhere. The classmate who smokes at the age of 12 is expelled but the expulsion is rescinded because his mother is the local MLA; indentities are pulled out at the drop of a pin - "you don't know me. I am the son of XYZ, or I am the Chief Inspector at CBI, or I am the friend of local Head Constable". All euphemisms for, "my lot is better than yours, I am superior. Therefore, I derive preference over you - whether it is to skip the queue at the doctor's clinic at the local hospital, or to get my son admission into the presstigious public school, or to be ahead of you in the VIP queue at Tirupati".

Is this my India? The challenges in fulfilling citizenship duties...

The workings of our governing institutions seem to want to divorce us for from our ownership of our country. Why is it okay in a democracy to be told "this is not your business"? Is this the country that Gandhi, Nehru or Ambedkar envisioned? Is it even the India that we deserve? Can we change this? How?

August - perhaps late August. Exhausted from a series of meetings, I am relaxing at a Coffee Day adjacent one of the gleaming new business towers in Jasola just behind Apollo Indraprashta, New Delhi. I step outside the coffee shop to go to a toilet that is located in the business tower. The guard salaams me as I enter the business tower, just as I notice a man with a naked gun and a belt displaying an array of bullets entering the Coffee Day shop.