This is not merely the end of the year. We are watching the culmination of the first quarter of the much-awaited 21st century. The scars of the 20th century with its World Wars, concentration camps, and cultural revolutions were expected to have been erased by the time we reached the 21st.
We, in India, too, had dreamt of a spirited future. India, the ancient palimpsest of accrued civilisations, was reborn as a self-consciously united and sovereign nation in the middle of the 20th century. By the time we stepped into the next century, we too hoped to have freed ourselves from the economic disadvantages, social ills and political unrest that held us back. We hoped to have taken our premier and rightful place in the comity of nations, showcasing our ability to live unitedly amid pressures that pulled us apart. What progress have we made in these two and a half decades? Where do we find ourselves? Are we not still engaged in an intense, and somewhat discomforting, conversation with our own conscience?
Economic indicators, democratic elections, and military might notwithstanding, a sense of deep unease prevails – questions of social harmony, cultural belonging, and spiritual identity have surfaced in a manner not witnessed in living memory. The past year has brought to the fore most clearly that India’s most pressing challenges are no longer only material; they are moral, cultural, relational.
A confident nation must have a broad sense of a shared identity. Indianness has been the umbrella under which separate cultural and religious affiliations found room, and strove to function like organs of a body that worked in unison. Distinctiveness within cultural and religious affiliations was quietly yet confidently lived out within communities and families.
In the past one year, we have witnessed a sharpening of identities, which are mutually competitive and not complementary. Now they are increasingly pushed into the public arena as markers of assertion. Social media platforms, TV debates, and political rhetoric have reduced complex identities into cheap slogans, creating an atmosphere where difference is viewed with suspicion rather than respectful curiosity. This has contributed to a growing sense of polarisation.
Nation, we had promised to ourselves, existed to achieve equality, liberty and fraternity, and to ensure justice for all. Nation, we are now told, must enthrone a specific cultural identity as an ideal that supersedes all previous considerations. When one version of culture is elevated as the only authentic one, it risks narrowing the idea of who belongs. Cultural affirmation can easily slip into cultural exclusion.
In this quest to have a unified national character, the question of spiritual identity cannot be left unaddressed. Religion is a powerful source of comfort for millions navigating economic uncertainty, social change, and personal loss. In recent times, faith has become more visible and assertive in public spaces. It is now synonymous with power and spectacle. The distinction between personal spirituality and public religiosity has grown blurred.
Inner faith, traditionally associated with humility, self-discipline, and compassion, has increasingly been overshadowed by outward displays that prioritise dominance and visibility.
Freedom of conscience, not dominance, is the bedrock of our democratic polity. But with recent developments both in the political and religious spheres, the right to choose has been compromised. Who will rule you and whom you will worship are questions, it seems, no longer up for discussion. Accommodation of differences, it appears, has become a thing of the past. This, in the long run, will test the national character, because if the citizens cannot freely choose, the nation cannot organically grow.
It may be unpalatable to hardliners across the ideological spectrum but robbing citizens of the freedom of conscience is robbing the nation of its soul. The common identity we seek to build must be founded on the freedom of conscience of the countless millions. That must be the goal for the next year and the next quarter of the century.