To the people of India,
It is time that you wake up. It is time that you shake yourself up to come to the reality that the ‘Breaking India’ forces are now almost at your doorstep. No, you will not see them coming towards you because you have chosen to close your eyes while you sit in the comfort of your homes and offices.
You continue to do so because you ‘think’ that this nation is ‘secular’, and that it should follow all the mindless ‘isms’ that the outer world has made for her. It is time to go beyond the books, beyond the rhetoric that has been fed to you through institutions like your schools and colleges (of national importance, by the way), beyond being a slave to your own comfort and your own stupid utopian ideas.
It’s time to come back to reality; because, if you don’t do it now, you’ll have no time to come back. Do not trust those who are speaking of ‘Breaking India’ today because they are going to break you tomorrow. For them, you’re just the means of a larger goal that they have. You’re just an element of their well thought out matrix which thrives on celebrating mediocrity, compartmentalizing people and theories, and a stupid mindless vision of a utopian world build solely on their propaganda.
They are the people who talk of village development sitting from the comforts of their air-conditioned rooms. They are also those who promote equality without understanding an iota of what does it actually mean. They are those who compartmentalize the whole world and it’s people into identities supported by various ‘isms’, supported by the army of pseudo-intellectuals, because, it suits the agenda of their masters; the masters they don’t even know; the masters who thrives on spreading their vision of breaking India into pieces.
On 2nd April, 2018, I witnessed a firsthand encounter of what Breaking India forces can do to sell their propaganda and achieve their goals.
Let me first tell you who I am. I am someone working with children in the villages of Vrindavan, a town famous for Lord Krishna’s musings and temples. I am someone who is trying to build this nation further by indulging in constructive development instead of dividing it through the narrative of cynicism and destruction.
On the 29th of March, I had taken a train to Mumbai to attend a Change Agents Retreat, a collective effort to bring 60 individuals from across the country doing impactful work in nation-building. During one of our field visits (we stayed at a Ekal Vidhyalya in Palghar, a tribal belt in Maharashtra), we had gone to meet the children of a school for the blind and mentally different (read, retarded) in Jawahar, Maharashtra. We were welcomed by confident voices of kids who sang us a welcome song followed by “Ae Mere Vatan Ke Logon”, an old Hindi song sung by Lata Mangeshkar to inspire the collective consciousness of a nation to never forget the sacrifices made by thousands of its heroes. This gesture by the kids shook all of us from the inside.
As we tried to hug them, hold them in an attempt to just know them a little bit, something changed internally within all of us. We had suddenly become more empathetic, inclusive and compassionate. We realised that we needed to work for them as well and not let them wander away from our imaginations when we design our curriculums, policies and solutions. I, for one, was eagerly waiting to go back to my kids in Vrindavan and tell them this story which shook us all.
Coming back from the Change Agents retreat, however, my train was attacked by hundreds of the ‘weaker’ sections of the society at Gangapur (Rajasthan) station. The fact that these attacks were so systematically arranged across the country completely takes away any doubt in my mind that they were not done ‘only’ done to ‘raise’ the voice of the ‘voiceless.’ The objective was to instill fear within passengers and administration through organised violence, plausibly supported by the goon’s political masters, to remain relevant in the game of 2019 elections, which has now officially started.
I witnessed these goons coming towards our train, with arms and ammunition (as told by police officers later) to plunder, attack, and possibly slaughter two thousand travellers (including children and women). Why would they come towards the train otherwise is something I haven’t got an answer to, yet. If it was not for the police who just came at the right time and defeated their ‘weaknesses’, I don’t know how the story would look like for two thousand passengers who were traveling with me that day. We sat on the platform for more than 10 hours with fear in our hearts, with supplies of food and water running out later in the night.
Little children, women and senior citizens were made to go through such uncalled-for trauma must be slammed by all, without recourse to any form of ‘whatboutery’. No section of the society (read, no section, irrespective of how weak and strong they are) has the right or privilege to hold the lives of people in such a way to argue for whatever cause they are fighting. Later in the night, when the train finally moved and reached the next station, Hindaun (Rajasthan), we could see a significant portion of the station destroyed with men and women carrying their children finding ways to board a train which could possibly take them all away from this mess and web of ‘weakness’ and ‘violence’.
I’m sure that you wouldn’t have heard any of this in the media that you so passionately follow and believe in. I’m also sure that no influential politician would tell you the frightening reality about what we faced on that day – I’m telling you this because it’s important; because if it can happen us, it will also happen to you as well. Only question being, when?
I’m telling you today that we are at a moment in history of this nation when we need to shake ourselves up from accepting mediocrity; from letting ourselves influence our minds as per the matrix created by pseudo-intellectuals sitting right in front of you in colleges, schools and even homes. Rise up, because we can’t afford to celebrate the ‘weaknesses’ anymore. India cannot break. I will not let that happen. You shouldn’t too.
As far as my kids back home are concerned, I am back to tell them the stories of an India which is full of heroes who died not ‘Breaking’ her but ‘Building’ her.
