Will the word Azadi also be banned?
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Every Independence Day and national days, every country thinks about new heights to be reached. Although the nation-builders taught us to dream of an India that leaps confidently and with its head held high towards a bright future, concerns about freedom and civil rights being trampled on day by day are growing. In the world's largest democracy, a land of plurality and diversity, the freedom to express one's opinion, to follow one's religious beliefs, the right to eat, worship, sing and listen to music, are being snatched away one by one, and this becomes a part of daily life. India's identity as a secular, egalitarian democracy is constantly under attack. Although legal battles to remove the socialist and secular concepts from the Preamble of the Constitution have not yielded results, forces of communal hatred forces constantly in an effort to destroy the secular-socialist nature of the country. Religious minorities in the country are facing unprecedented atrocities and encroachments. The world has witnessed the brutality of the Bajrang Dal, a communal terrorist group, against two Keralite nuns who were serving in the tribal areas of Chhattisgarh, where the light of development has not yet reached, even as we move into the eighth decade of independence. The railway officials who inform the Bajrang Dal attackers that the tribal women are planning to travel with the nuns, and the group of attackers who organise and challenge them in front of the court while considering their bail application, reveal the dangerous state of affairs the country is in.
Cases of mob lynchings on false charges are repeated every week in different parts of the country. It is an undeniable fact that ninety per cent of those killed are Muslims or Dalit tribals. How horrifically the constitutional promise of the right to life is being violated. People who have the same right to the soil and breath of the country are being thrown into the middle of the sea on suspicion of their citizenship, as each and every one of us are being deported. A hundred reasons are being given to demolish and evict millions of poor people from their only source of livelihood. Ignoring even the Supreme Court’s verdict against the implementation of ‘bulldozer justice’ by bypassing the country’s legal systems and courts, 3973 houses in Goalpara, Assam, have been demolished and razed to the ground in recent weeks. The allegations that the Indian general elections, which are celebrated as a festival of democracy, but have been marred by far greater fraud than we have ever heard of, are being made public with evidence to support them. If every reform introduced in the name of preventing vote-rigging, fake votes, and booth-hogging is meant to put democracy in a box, if the entire festival of democracy has been hijacked for someone's benefit, then what is being held hostage here is our rights and freedoms.
The Union Home Ministry has banned 25 books in Jammu and Kashmir, including ‘Azadi’ by Booker Prize winner and world-renowned civil rights activist Arundhati Roy, and ‘The Kashmir Dispute: 1947-2012’ by constitutional expert and historian A.G. Noorani. The crime of possessing a copy of one of these books, which has garnered international attention, will be enough to hunt down Kashmiri youth, intellectuals and journalists. At the same time, in a country where books, songs and even comedy shows are banned, hate speeches and calls for genocide are being made without question or legal recourse. A BJP leader who made a hate speech against an army officer who explained the military operation against Pakistan is still in the state cabinet. The word ‘Azadi’ means freedom. Freedom itself is the elixir of life, freedom itself is life, as sung by the great Malayalam poet Kumaran Asan about the proud people, for whom freedom is the lifeblood. One need not be surprised if the government, which hunted down students who shouted slogans demanding ‘Azadi’ from fascism and communalism, bans not only the book but also the very word ‘Azadi’ itself. The ‘Azadi’ of the country, which was achieved through the martyrdom of thousands of brave people, is not to be surrendered to anyone. The democratic and civil rights forces in India will continue to claim ‘Azadi’ from mob lynching, hate speeches and vote-rigging.
