Sixty Years after Tryst with Destiny: Woh Subaha Kabhi to Ayegi
Arun Kumar, CESP, JNU.
The Tribune, August 29, 2007.
Nehru’s `tryst with destiny’ suggested that India would wake up to a new day. The country has made substantial material progress since that fateful and historic day 60 years back. But the freedom struggle had other goals as well. Countless people `sacrificed their today for a better tomorrow for us’. Have we achieved that better today? Was there not a different vision than the one that we have worked for? Doubts arise not only because mass poverty persists, illiteracy is rampant and insanitary conditions and ill health continue to take a heavy toll but because we hardly have a vision left except to follow the West and in the process we have perhaps got the worst of both the worlds.
In material terms, a few, numbering less than 3% of the population, have done well while the rest are trapped in a low level equilibrium. We boast of more billionaires than Japan while in terms of per capita income we are in the bottom twenty out of 177 nations. The former then is a reflection of terrible inequity and nothing to gloat about. Largest number of people below the poverty line, farmers suicides, huge urban slums, fields in and around cities functioning as vast toilets, the inability of the so called literates to understand modern technology, etc., suggest that the nation as a whole has yet to awake to a new morning.
In the 1958 movie, `Phir Subaha Hogi’, Mukesh singing with pathos, “Woh Subaha Kabhi to Ayegi” (That morning will come some time), epitomized the dream of the common Indian of the Fifties and the Sixties. Many of us as children internalized the idea that we will build a better future for all our countrymen and perhaps we would build a new civilization that would surpass the West. Sixty years after independence perhaps the shreds of this dream are not even left in the dustbins of those in power and supposedly guiding the destiny of this nation. That dream has been blown away in the hurricane of achieving 9% growth.
The song is not just about eliminating poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy but about a dream of building a different society – a peaceful one where everyone (specially the marginalized) would live with dignity. Gandhi’s “last Person First”. The song defines that happy morning as “Jab ambar jhum ke nachega, Jab dharti nagme gayegi”. When the sky would dance with joy and the Earth would sing songs. Today, at our low per capita consumption, the air, water and land are terribly polluted and weeping rather than singing and dancing. The most revered Ganga or Godavari are heavily polluted, their beds contaminated with huge amounts of toxic material that would affect the future generations. Even the sacred is no more sacred, so what is sacrosanct?
The song goes “Jab dukh ke badal pighlenge” (when the clouds of sorrow will melt). “Insano ki izzat jab jhute sikkon me na toli jayegi” (when people’s dignity would not be measured by false money). “Mana ki abhi tere mere armano ki kimat kuch bhi nahin”, (Agreed that today our dreams have no value). But their was belief, one day this would change. For the vast numbers of the marginalized sections, sorrow is a daily and endless fare that is not melting away. Dozens of their children can disappear in Nithari and little is done. The only escape is what Bollywood dishes out - sex and violence. The government provides little relief since it fails to deliver. Faith in politicians is a casualty. The dignity of the poor is even more firmly mortgaged to money when unemployment is so high and the youth has to take to crime to fulfill its expectations. The dreams of the deprived have no value to the rulers who in their self centerdness can only see in them the means to fulfill their own narrow dreams of great riches, like, in the misallocation of land meant for the poor displaced slum dwellers.
Today labour is devalued while speculation and greed have been raised to a new high pedestal. A mere 1% of the population linked to the corporate sector earns more than what 60%, dependent on agriculture, do. Disparities have risen more sharply in the last 6 years than in the earlier 54 years. The young are encouraged to sell soap but not to contribute to nation building through teaching and research. Sacrifice appears to be stupidity, undermining the entire effort of the freedom fighters. Those of them who still survive ruefully ask, is this what they fought for?
The 3%, the ruling elite of the nation aspire to join the international elite, sending its children to study college abroad, going there for vacations or to hospitals for health problems. It is voting with its feet. A school in Chappra or a dispensary in Ghungrawali has little value to it but Delhi must have 24 hours water and electricity. That is progress. The emotional attachment with the nation is gone.
Corruption is rampant both in the public and the private sectors. Institutions, like the legislatures, judiciary and the bureaucracy, are breaking down. The elite is lawless breaking every single law – from traffic laws to building bye-laws to industrial and environmental laws. Many of the rich have earned more through illegal means than legal ones. The political leaders hardly represent the people - leading a life of luxury. Democracy is a great institution but in India it has been turned into a fine art for self aggrandizement. The bankruptcy of our leadership led to our jettisoning of the ideas of independent development in the Eighties and of the `last person first’ in the Nineties.
From tall leaders like Gandhi who could give up everything to the present day leadership that cannot give up anything. From the idea of voluntary poverty to the notion of greed as the driving force of our society. From society and nation to the self. The transition has been made from a national vision for all to a vision for a few. We are going in the direction opposite to the line in Mukesh’s song, “Miti ka bhi kuch mol magar insano ki kimat kuch bhi nahin” (Even earth has some value but human beings have none). Farmers commit suicide in increasing numbers and packages are announced with little effect.
The land of Gandhi has turned into the land of the bania (not that he was not a bania). The credit for this goes to the very party which Gandhi built. Clever ones would shamelessly argue, even Gandhi would have done the same in the present context. Would they consider that a man given to simplicity, sacrifice and truth and not show, half truths and consumerism would have blanched at this suggestion?
From the notion that the ills of our society have a social cause to the idea that the individual is to blame for her predicament, it is a long journey. Everyone has now to go to the market to get what they need, government is no more responsible for elimination of poverty, etc.. The devil may take the hindmost.
Nations are built on dreams but we have narrowed it to money making. So how do we build a great nation as `Nehru’s tryst’ suggested or to which Mukesh referred to in the song, Jis subaha ki khatir yug yug se ham sab mar mar ke jite aiyen hain. (That morning for whose sake from eons we all have been living by dying a thousand deaths). Gandhi had a dream for the nation that the party he helped build has shattered. He perhaps saw what was coming so he wanted the party to dissolve itself so that this farce would not have occurred. He wanted the Rashtrapati Bhavan to be converted into a hospital not because that would have been functional but because that would have given birth to many more dreams rather than converting the freedom fighters into rulers in the imperial mould. So Sixty years down the road we are still waiting for that new dawn in the midst of 9% growth. Mukesh would have to sing, `Who Subaha Abhi to Nahin Ayegi’.
