Struggle for the freedom from fear

FREEDOM has many meanings and new ones continue to emerge with the passage of history. Which meaning was paramount when India became a free nation is not easy to decide. Semantically, it is more convenient to talk about freedom as independence. However, the choice of a word does not diminish the complexity involved in defining freedom in India’s context.

A collective aspiration for the end of British rule found dramatic expression several times over down the years. And it inspired numerous colonised nations of other continents. What distinguished our struggle for freedom was the specific vision it held about a free India. This facet of our struggle was undoubtedly owed to the leadership we were fortunate to have.

Some members of today’s younger generation focus more on the limitations of India’s anti-colonial leadership and its achievements. They are victims of today’s social environment, which is ideologically charged and dominated by the so-called social media. It does not allow anything to be discussed at length or with comfort.

Accusations and counter-accusations take over in no time, and the urge to shock overcomes the impulse to talk. The platforms available for discussion on social media are owned by a global plutocracy, but the impression persists that they are good for democracy.

In his book Techno-feudalism, Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis has demonstrated how the digital empire of the world’s wealthiest individuals has turned us all into serfs who produce data for techno-companies to increase their profits. Dependent on social media for information, today’s young students perceive the history of India’s freedom struggle as both distant and mundane. Worse still, it is now as vulnerable to distortion as are the older phases of India’s history.

The uniqueness of Gandhi’s leadership of India’s freedom movement was a matter of consensus until quite recently. It is now subjected to anachronistic doubts and quick, summary judgment. Gandhi led us into self-awareness and the recognition of a more comprehensive idea of freedom than we can find in the history of any other colonised country.

A major aspect of this idea was freedom from fear. Tagore expressed it in the opening line of a famous poem in his Gitanjali — ‘where the mind is without fear’; the poem ends with the phrase ‘heaven of freedom’. These words give us a handy compass to decipher the social ethos that surrounds us all today, especially girls and women, for whom freedom from fear is a mirage.

The Constitution used this compass to indicate the common sources of fear that had defined colonial rule. The fear of oppression and discrimination underlies the fundamental rights listed in the Preamble. The exercise of these rights is no small matter, for it demands what Gandhi meant by Swaraj — the term that best represents his idea of freedom. In his compact political treatise, Hind Swaraj, he defined it as the capacity to rule oneself.

The term Swaraj offers a remarkable sense of the purpose of education, which today is overshadowed by the delusory discourses of job-readiness and technology-driven growth. Education for Swaraj meant that citizens could be trusted to guide themselves, that they wouldn’t rush to seek the state’s intervention to manage their daily life. It also meant that the state would trust civic wisdom and concerns.

A small, rain-fed rivulet flows through Chandigarh. It swells when the rains persist; then, it settles down into its dense little valley, inhabited by water hens and peacocks. It was not easy to keep it clean, but during the Covid-19 years, this beautiful little choe became a convenient place to throw litter. I noticed cars stopping by, windows rolling down, to let garbage be hurled down into the choe. A few months ago, the administration decided to erect tall and strong chain-link metal frames on the bridges. They now stand as stern reminders that citizens couldn’t be trusted to keep the tiny river’s bed clean. In Delhi, citizens have sought help from the highest court to control stray dogs. These are two instances showing that the sense of community — based on common, secular concerns — has no presence in urban life, except in the shape of NGOs.

As a word, ‘community’ had become associated with religion towards the later phase of the national movement. A similar association between caste and community has also remained intact. Education could not dilute these two associations. Nor could it contain the growth of polarity around religion and caste. A refreshing meaning of community had emerged when the common concerns of South Asia were recognised under SAARC. That community has also withered away for now.

These signs indicate that fraternity — a major value enshrined in the Constitution — is also not in good health. It was a legacy of the freedom struggle. In a sharply hierarchical and diverse society, living in a vast and varied geography, the struggle against colonial rule created new bonds of unity. Who can miss the decline of these fraternal bonds?

The social fabric feels thinner today, and dependence on the state machinery to keep it intact has greatly increased. Before India had become a sovereign nation-state, it had learnt the importance of peaceful resistance and amicable public conversation. Though the means available for communication are now faster and more efficient, the capacity to engage in exchange of ideas has waned. The right to express oneself was guaranteed by the Constitution. It meant more than getting away with a clever, short barb on social media.

For a long time, teachers like me assumed that schools, colleges and universities were sites of free conversation. These institutions provide the venue for social introspection — a necessarily slow, relaxed activity. The freedom to look within and talk to others who disagree with us is an important, somewhat unacknowledged inheritance of our freedom struggle.

Attainment of freedom from British rule provided an occasion for devolving the idea of self-rule or autonomy to every educational institution. It happened to some extent at the higher levels of the system, never in schools. And now, the loss of autonomy is the common, definitive story of our public universities. Matters of this kind are too important to be put aside after the day of freedom passes.

Krishna Kumar is former Director, NCERT.