Hindustan

Vasu Reddy from Chicago
vasureddy@aol.com

After the BJP won a landslide win in Uttar Pradesh and appointed Yogi Adithyanath as the chief minister there were usual comments from the opposition.  As I continue to follow the politics of India (in fact the world) I was stunned when a veteran INC politician Veerappa Moily made a statement “Biggest Assault on Secularism”. “This is not Hinduism, Hinduism is not India.”.  Moily is a veteran politician and someone who is well versed (I hope and thought) on India, its politics and certainly its history at least from the 1947 Independence.  He after all is one of the veterans of the Congress party that drove the Indian Independence movement.  Moily could have simply googled the internet and get a hit on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustan.

My Saturday evening instinct was that even the old men of India, seem to ignore their roots and nation when they come in front of a microphone.  Even the little children of the country (in fact any country) will pay reverence to their nation.  Here was a man who has been a political leader in independent India all his life, but has forgotten that the land is what it is.

For a secular nation, India is by far the most inclusive and tolerant societies on earth.  Granted that it has been looted for centuries thru its eventual and so called independence in 1947, the country still suffers poverty and illiteracy.  More than any other societal evil, India suffers scam and cheating by those in power and in control of the nation’s democracy.  Moily has been a part of the party that spent most of the time being in control of the independent India.  Most importantly he also belongs to the party that worked hard for India’s independence from the British.  He should really know that this the ancestral land of Hindus and it is Hindustan for ages.  There should never have been ignorance as an excuse for Moily, but it was simply his reaction to the failure of his party to govern a nation with respect to its democracy.  India for all its difficulties and social discrepancies, survives as a democracy.  India does vote for its leaders and gives them an opportunity to govern and manage its vast population and resources.  When India sees the incompetence and looting, it certainly sends the culprits to political oblivion.  With each election, India is quite fluid in its definition of democracy and its demands on what the government should do, and the latest election once again demonstrates Indian electorate choosing a party that they believe will meet the needs of the population.

It has become a political fashion for democracies to keep slinging stupid comments once a party is thrown out of power.  Especially a party like INC in India has lost its relevance and its impetus for the nation.  It clings on to a few old men who will keep hurling insulting comments to any outlet they can find, and now starting to insult the nations existence.  They have nothing left to speak of, and the last resort is to raise the communal tensions by delegitimizing the nation and its secularism.

In a nation of 1.3 billion or so people, who by and large live peacefully and when given a chance will vote for the future.  They are all very smart and very wise.  The problems are amply driven by losing political parties in sighting the caste or regional issues, or by neighboring countries promoting terror.  Despite the internal and external meddling, Indians seem to move on and focus on what they need and what their families need.

One of the blessings for the nation is eradicating the incompetence and fighting the terror, although taking time, but eventuality is both bod politics and terror will be dealt with, without the nation losing its secularism.  Just the past 3 years are a great testament to India’s ability to be secular and democratic.  It is time for Moily and all his compatriots to move to a retirement location on the vast coastal area of India and enjoy the sun.