This is an emotional moment for me and I feel privileged to be here with you. I feel I am standing in the shadow of great Maharashtrians – Mahadev Govind Ranade who founded this sammelan and whose name is part of the modern history of our country, the distinguished Marathi writers who have chaired its conventions and all the writers who have taken part in its sessions and whose writing has enriched the great creative enterprise known as Indian literature.
It is also an emotional moment for me because of my own connection with Maharashtra through my father, Ranjit Sitaram Pandit. I would like to tell you a little about him. He was a Sanskrit scholar from a family of distinguished Sanskrit scholars and he translated three Sanskrit classics into English: Mudra Rakshasa, Kalidas’s Ritusamhara, and Rajatarangini.
Rajatarangini is the 12th century history of the kings of Kashmir by Kalhana, and it had a special fascination for my father because his two great loves were Sanskrit and Kashmir. He worked on this translation during two of his jail terms during British rule and dedicated it to his Kashmiri father-in-law, Pandit Motilal Nehru. His brother-in-law, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote an introduction to this work when it was published. I am deeply grateful to Dr Aruna Dhere and Shri Prashant Talnikar for their great labor of translating this massive history into my father’s—and their own—native tongue, Marathi. I know that nothing would have made him happier.
Both my parents took part in the national movement for freedom under Mahatma Gandhi. My mother, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, was imprisoned three times and my father, four times. During his fourth imprisonment he fell seriously ill in the terrible conditions and environment of Bareilly Jail. He was given no medical treatment and my mother was not informed how very ill he was. Yet he had refused to ask for his release. When she was finally informed of his condition, she was allowed to have a 20-minute interview with him. It took place, according to the rule, in the office of the jail superintendent and under his watchful eye, which gave a political prisoner no privacy with his visitor. It shocked my mother to see him brought in on a stretcher. His head had been shaved and his body was emaciated. She almost broke down at the sight of him but somehow she held back her tears because she knew he would not want her to cry in front of the jailer.
He told her why he wouldn’t ask for the favor of being released. “I have fought with the lions, Gandhi and Nehru,” he said. “Do you want me to behave like a jackal now?”
She knew she couldn’t change his mind so she controlled herself and sat near the stretcher, held his hand and gave him news of home and the children, and what was growing in the garden he loved. When the government released him at last, it was only to die about three weeks later. Many years later, after Independence, when my mother was India’s High Commissioner in Britain and was sitting next to Prime Minister Winston Churchill at a lunch, he said to her, “We killed your husband, didn’t we?” It was an admission that took her by surprise.
Most of you were not born in the 1940s and you grew up in an independent country, so I have shared this personal story to show you the courage and discipline of those times and the spirit of the men and women who fought for freedom. My parents were among many thousands of Indians—known and unknown, young and old—who committed their lives to that great fight and suffered all kinds of hardship because they had a passion for freedom. I want to ask you, do we have that same passion for freedom today? Are we worthy of those men and women who have gone before us, some of whom died fighting so that future Indians could live in freedom?
I am asking this question because our freedoms are in danger. The dangers to them are so much on my mind that when I was thinking about what I should say to you, I knew I had to talk about all that is happening in India today, because it is affecting every side of our lives: what we eat, who we marry, what we think, what we write, and, of course, how we worship.
Today, we have a situation where diversity and opposition to the ruling ideology are under fierce attack.
Diversity is the very meaning of our civilization. We have old literatures in many different languages. We eat different foods, we dress differently, we have different festivals, and we follow different religions. Inclusiveness has been our way of life and this ancient multicultural civilization whose name is India is a most remarkable achievement that no other country has known. Today it is threatened by a policy to wipe out our religious and cultural differences and force us into a single identity. With one stroke, this policy wipes out the constitutional rights of millions of our countrymen and women who are not Hindus, and makes invaders, outsiders and enemies of them. At Independence, our founding fathers rejected a religious identity and had the wisdom to declare India a secular democratic republic, not because they were against religion but because they understood that in our country of many religions, only a secular state would provide the overall umbrella of neutrality under which every Indian would have the right to live and worship according to his or her faith. The Constituent Assembly that took this decision was made up of a majority of Hindus, yet they drew up a Constitution whose preamble affirmed a life of liberty, equality, and fraternity for all Indians.
(Abridged. The article was first published in Scroll.in and is republished under special arrangement.)