Why I Am a Liberal by Sagarika Ghose

Author:Sagarika Ghose
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353053543
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2018-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

Why We Should be Proud to be Liberal and Indian

The liberal view is the state exists to safeguard the individual. The individual is not a soldier of state power. The rights of the individual therefore become the supreme consideration because liberty is the supreme good. Those street mobs who are trying to take away this freedom are not protectors of identity, they are just terrorists peddling fear. Should these violence-using terrorists be guardians of culture in India, as they are in parts of the Muslim world? Intriguingly, the RSS, which today is helping to create the Hindutva Big State, was once a great opponent of the Nehruvian Big State. Delegates of the RSS’ Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha resolved in a declaration in March 1959: ‘The tendency of the Government to establish its control and monopoly . . . over various spheres of social life is becoming more and more pronounced. Concentration of power in the hands of the government is growing at a fast pace and individual freedom is getting curtailed . . . this all round onslaught on people’s liberty is a grave crime against all human values . . . [we must] stand up in the defence of the freedom and dignity of the individual.’131 Today, the RSS is supporting the extinguishing of individual liberty in the quest to build the Hindu Rashtra.

Defending personal freedom is also, in many ways, a defence of Indian traditions. Attacking personal freedoms is profoundly anti-Indian. If identity warriors set themselves the task of hypothetically demolishing the Taj Mahal, as the Taliban once blasted away the Bamiyan Buddhas, it will be because citizens did not protect freedom as strongly as we need to. The essence of Indian spiritual and cultural heritage is the ultimate individualistic pursuit of self-realization. Recognition and respect for personal freedom in a modern polity is an extension of that age-old wisdom.

Those who are attacking the mainsprings of Indianness, who are hacking away at the deep roots of liberalism in our soil and flying in the face of generation upon generation of free thinkers and iconoclasts are ironically posing as the so-called defenders of ‘Indian’ identity. It is the free minds who are being attacked by fearful minds.

The liberal spirit of the Constitution of India is thus far more authentically ‘Bharatiya’ than the manufactured outrage of those who worship at the altars of the extremist and violent versions of Islamist and Christian extremism. The deep respect for the individual, the long tradition of tolerance, of locating the universe itself in the core of individual anarchism or the atma, that is the spirit of generations of poets, philosophers, fakirs, women wanderers, pirs, sanyasis, naked sadhus and bohemian rebels who have lived and died in the Indian subcontinent. Today the mimic men of the Taliban want Indians to shun that dizzying procession down the ages, of unconventional free spirits, and follow in the steps of the violent orthodoxy-upholding Hezbollah or ISIS.

No, we subcontinentals are no pale imitators of Semitic extremists. How can

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