Subhas Chandra Pattanayak
Meretricious tears of the President on this Republic Day giving words to wishful thinkings that resembles Gandhiji’s ‘Theory of Trusteeship’ is what is expected of a government that has grabbed and ruined India.
When in the Raj he heads, only 1% individuals have amassed 73% of the country’s wealth in 2017 according to the latest published study of OXFAM, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in its report has said that, in 2017 India ranked 100 amongst 113 hunger-stricken countries in the Global Hunger Index.
The Government dancing to the tune of big business in policy-making that leads to utter minimization of workers salaries for maximizing the returns to the shareholders/owners has precipitated this pathetic condition of hunger, says the surveyors. But this is what is ‘development’ to the Government the President spoke for.
Against this backdrop, on this Republic Day, I recall how Dr. Ambedkar had painfully confessed in the Constituent Assembly on third reading of the Draft Constitution that overwhelming presence of the wealthy class in the Drafting Committee as well as in the Assembly had not allowed the purpose of the Freedom struggle translated into unavoidable compulsoriness in the Constitution. rather, its scheme had allowed the rich to enjoy fundamental right over property, where the same right over property given to a poverty-stricken wage-earner would not help him escape the economic inequality that was so rampant even at that moment. The Constitution would bring in contradiction by perpetuating the rich-man’s independence to expand his empire of wealth while pushing the poor man into further imperilment on the uneven level of earning.
“We must remove the contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up”, Dr. Amdekar had helplessly wished that day (CAD, Vol.XI,p.979).
The OXFAM report read with the GHI report referred to supra clearly establish how continuous rule by the rich-men has ruined India as post-independence regimes have blatantly failed to remove the contradiction discerned by the makers of this Republic.
So, where is the Republic that we celebrate today as a matter of animal habit?
A very young poet of my land (Tigiria), Sri Purna Chandra Das had wondered in 2016 as to how the immortal Mahatma and all the freedom fighters that had made their supreme sacrifices to free us from the British yoke and had given birth to our Republic should feel to see this India, if, perchance, they come back one day, in a song he had authored. Adyasha Productions, compiling the song into an audio CD had given me the opportunity to inaugurate the same on 7 Feb.2016. Sri Das has sent me a video clip containing the song and its launching event.
With his permission I have uploaded the same to YouTube. Sri Shailendra Patra his co-lyricist, has sung it. And, I deem it proper to share the same with you all this Republic Day.
Listen it , dear all. And if possible, cry your heart out with it, so that the vacuum to be created shall be filled up with determination to wipe out the inequality that imperils our motherland.
Dear all, listen the song and cry, if you can, with the young poet and lyricist. Your Republic , your beloved Motherland, is certainly in the worst possible hands as the two above noted reports say. Celebration of the Republic Day should no more be mere animal habit, it must have to be the celebration of a lively nation free from the contradiction that has kept us eclipsed in the same domain of exploitation, to free us from which our martyrs had sacrificed their lives.
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