The National Pledge, the oath of allegiance to the Republic of India, and the Preamble to the Constitution of India are printed in the first few pages of our children’s textbooks.
The National Pledge of India in fact completed its golden jubilee last year. Its Telegu author, PV Subba Rao (1916–1988) who wrote it in 1962 apparently was unaware it had been adopted nationally until a year before his death when he happened to hear his granddaughter read it from a school textbook. Its fundamental statement is “All Indians are my brothers and sisters.” The rest of its text stems from that basic premise.
The Preamble to the Constitution of India came into effect even earlier, on January 26 1950, which is why we celebrate that day annually as our Republic Day. It was another pledge by “We, the people of India” to secure to all its citizens “Justice, social, economic and political; Liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; Equality of status and of opportunity; and to promote among them all; Fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation.”
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, who chaired the committee which drafted our Constitution and to me is one of our nation’s greatest founding fathers, said about the Preamble: “It was, indeed, a way of life, which recognizes liberty, equality, and fraternity as the principles of life and which cannot be divorced from each other: Liberty cannot be divorced from equality; equality cannot be divorced from liberty. Nor can liberty and equality be divorced from fraternity. Without equality, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Equality without liberty would kill individual initiative. Without fraternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things.”
The viral video of the shameful incident last August in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh (UP), where a Muslim schoolboy, at the instigation of his school teacher (who also made communal remarks about his faith) was slapped by his classmates made me think of both the Preamble and the Pledge. It took me back to my own school days and made me check my teenage son’s school textbooks. If I remember correctly, my generation’s textbooks had just the Pledge, not the Preamble. So the presence of both in my son’s textbooks by comparison was an improvement.
I couldn’t help going back to my childhood and imagining what I would have felt if I were that hapless victim, being insulted for merely having an inherited belief system, and having injury and humiliation added to that insult by being slapped by one’s own peers. I try to imagine it happening to my son today and feel sick to my stomach.
What use are pledges, preambles and promises on pieces of paper, if they cannot even be upheld in the very classroom in which the textbooks are opened and read, by a school teacher no less (who also happens to be the school principal and who initially said after the deed that she was “not ashamed” of it, although she later changed her tune)? What message does it send to that boy and his classmates, and indeed to the rest of us? That platitudes are empty, and reality is something else? Why are divisions and hatred being sown into innocent minds, the very antithesis of the principles enshrined in both the Pledge and the Preamble?
A month later, the Supreme Court rebuked the UP police for its “shoddy probe” into the incident. “The state must take responsibility for the education of the child. If the allegations are true, this should shock the conscience of the state,” the Supreme Court judge said. “The father had given a statement that his son was beaten because of his religion, but it wasn’t mentioned in the FIR (First Information Report). It’s a matter of quality education, which also includes sensitive education. There is a prima facie case of failure on the part of the Uttar Pradesh government in complying with the provisions of the RTE (Right to Education) Act. Serious and worrying … it’s a matter of right to life,” the judge said.
Last month another post went viral. It was the Telegraph India’s response to a statement made by India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar at an event at the Hudson Institute, Washington D. C. “I defy you to show me discrimination,” he had said.
The Telegraph duly obliged with several instances of discrimination in just the past year or so, with dates and details, adding “This is not an exhaustive list by a distance.”
Topping the list was the crude verbal attack on BSP (Bahujan Samaj Party) MP Danish Ali in the Lok Sabha by BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) MP Ramesh Bidhuri in September, using filthy language aimed at insulting his faith. Ali told the press later that if an elected legislator could be threatened inside the Parliament like this, then “it speaks volumes about what an average Muslim in this country would be facing”.
I was watching a discussion about a 2009 documentary film ‘Mendelssohn, the Nazis and me’, made by (German composer of Jewish descent) Mendelssohn’s great-great-great-grandniece Sheila Hayman. Hayman describes her own aunt Rhea going back to the classroom in Munich where she had been ‘shamed’ as a little school girl in the early 1930s in front of all her classmates on account of her Jewish identity. The classroom had not changed, and the humiliation she had felt then came back to her like a tidal wave.
How will that Muzaffarnagar school boy remember his own equally traumatic episode when he is an adult? Why did he have to suffer it in the first place? Why does the nation have to suffer this tearing asunder of the fraternal bonds that bind us all together? Who is ‘anti-national’, those who seek to divide us, or those (be they in the press or in civil society) who call out and stand up to these divisive forces?
(Dr Luis Dias is a physician, musician, writer and founder of Child’s Play India Foundation)
