Bapu Your Children Need You

Bapu, Father of the Nation, we miss you. The country is passing through troubled times. There is unrest and mass agitation among students, academics, farmers, and the poor and deprived. We live in a social, political, and economic environment, where the rich grow richer and the poor, poorer; Where one’s freedom and loyalty to the country are measured by his or her religion and caste. Bapu we miss you and need you most desperately

 You gave us Freedom and yet seventy years on our freedom is threatened, not by foreign powers but by people among us. Your vision of a united India, an India where all communities live in peace and harmony, has been distorted by those who wish to create a society based on fear.

 Across the country there is growing unhappiness and helplessness. Today the minorities, women, adivasis, and the poor, live in fear deprived of their fundamental freedoms. Farmers are living in want and are resorting to suicide to escape their misery. Students are harassed, arrested and jailed for demanding justice.

 You worked for a country which would provide for all and yet the only ones who seem happy and prosperous, are those who are members of the one percent elite wealth creators club, who have friends in power and with influence. While the one percent add to their wealth, on a daily basis even in the pandemic, those left out struggle to make ends meet.

 Bapu surely this was not the India you had envisaged and fought for. It was your vision that India should grow into a nation where peace, harmony, nonviolence , and human respect and dignity were supreme. Where people of all castes, communities, and religions would live and work together to build an India, which would shine among the comity of nations.

At the dawn of independence Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had said “The ambition of the greatest man of our generation (that was you) has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but as long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over. And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams.” Bapu, Those were your dreams for India

“We have often been unworthy followers of his and have strayed from his message”, Nehru had said, “but not only we but succeeding generations will remember this message and bear the imprint in their hearts of this great son of India, magnificent in his faith and strength and courage and humility. We shall never allow that torch of freedom to be blown out, however high the wind or stormy the tempest.”

Words of hope which galvanized the nation and for over fifty years the nation worked to fulfill your dreams. Alas we have strayed and have added more people with tears to those existing in yesteryears.

These are not just tears for poverty and deprivation but also for the loss of the hope of freedom and justice. They are tears for the loss of harmony and brotherhood and the deliberate attempts to drive a wedge among the castes and religions who fought shoulder to shoulder to help in the struggle for independence.

One of the most appalling is the fact that several lakhs of our people continue to suffer from want and lack of economic opportunities. The pandemic has revealed the stark reality of the sufferings of our working class who have been rendered jobless and deserted with virtually no means of survival. To rub salt into a raw wound state and central governments are making changes in labour to satisfy the greed of industrialists.

You stood for the dignity of labour and their rights. You expressed concern for the working class and spoke against their exploitation by the rich. You said “A nation may do without millionaires and without its capitalists, but it can never do without its labour. To receive higher wage for his labour is labourer’s right. Labour discharges its obligation more effectively and more conscientiously than the master who has corresponding obligations towards the labourers.”

Bapu we are treating the working class most inhumanly. We use them for constructing the temples and cities of modern India and yet we throw them away unsung after we have used them and we do not need them. Indian capitalists follow a use-and-throw policy even for those who made their life easy and comfortable.  The present model for developmental turns migrant workers into rootless and jobless millions, living as beggars in hovels and shanties or the streets of the metros.

Bapu you had wanted that the workers should be paid a wage which will allow them to live a life of dignity and respect and enable them to provide for the education of their children. Today the salaries paid to labour are insufficient even to meet the essential daily needs of the family leaving virtually very little for medical expenses and the education of their children

 The Government is fueling inequality by underfunding public services, such as healthcare and education, on the one hand, while under-taxing corporations and the wealthy, and failing to clamp down on tax dodging, on the other. "India's combined revenue and capital expenditure of the Centre and state for medical and public health, sanitation, and water supply is Rs 2,08,166 crore, less than the wealth of the world’s fifth wealthiest billionaire at Rs 2,80,700 crore."

 "It is morally outrageous that a few wealthy individuals are amassing a growing share of India's wealth' while the poor are struggling to eat their next meal or pay for their child's medicine.” The Indian capitalist class, with the support of obliging government machinery, has given a pass to these ideas. As a result exploitation of the workers has become a norm. During this pandemic the country witnessed the inhuman treatment they received from the government and big business.

Bapu on several occasion you had spoken against the mere multiplication of material wants which you rightly said was not the highroad to happiness and godliness. “An economics,” you wrote in The Harijan in 1937, “that inculcates Mammon(wealth) worship, that enables the strong to amass wealth at the expense of the weak, is a false and dismal science. True economics… stands for social justice and moral values.”

Economic development over the years is a story of exploitation of the poor and deprived for the benefit of a few rich. The gap between the rich and the poor has increased because of the pro-rich, Make in India, policies of the present and past governments. The plight of labour has been ignored even though they qualify to be called the builders of modern India

This article first appeared on the Hamara Noida blog at https://noidasmartcity.blogspot.com/