Thakur Ranjit Singh
Auckland, August 19, 2020
While we marked India’s Independence Anniversary on August 15, this subject will always be relevant, since ‘Bharat Swatantra Divas’ is dear to people of Indian origin and to history.
India now has a leader who has started untangling the shackles that the country was under since 1947 when it had very wanting and at times, questioning leadership.
Events in Kashmir and elsewhere, changing laws to grant rights to persecuted Indians in nearby Islamic nations, changing laws to make all Indians to come under one law, and the construction of Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, among others, make 2020 historically a very significant Bharat Swatantra Divas or India Independence Day.
As we celebrated Janma Ashtami (Lord Krishna’s Birthday), we prayed unto him: “Pura kar de aaj vachan who Gita mein joh tuu ne diya” (Fulfil the promise you gave in Bhagavat Gita to come back to save Bharat when goodness and compassion are under threat).
It appears God has listened and sent us Narendra Modi.
I hope that Indians can recognise him and support in his quest to make Bharat Mata (Mother India) proud and great once again.
Tryst with destiny
At midnight of August 14 1947, the first Prime Minister of Independent India, Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, gave the historical, Tryst with Destiny speech:
“Long years ago we made a tryst (date) with destiny (fate), and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.
“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”
Tribute to ancestors
I dedicate this article on behalf of the Indian Diaspora in Auckland and in memory of my Indian Girmitya (Indentured Labourer) grandfather Bansi and in memory of all freedom fighters who were able to deliver this dream of Independent India.
I am a third generation Fiji Indian by ethnicity. My grandfather was displaced from Karouli in Rajasthan and torn and tricked from his roots by the British in 1915, to slave in Fiji to fill their coffers via sugar plantations, as a Girmitya.
I made a pilgrimage to his village in 2003.
India, under a wanting leadership appear to have fallen under a huge chasm where many are still unaware of its history. It is significant that this article in written, not by an Indian (from India), but a son of Indian Diaspora where umbilical cord had been cut from India some 140 years ago and implanted in the South Pacific, in Fiji Islands as indentured labourers.
As an indentured labourer and later as a cane farmer in Fiji, my grandfather Bansi grew up craving for his Motherland, Bharat. He was in Fiji when India became Independent. I grew up affected by his patriotism, listening to 78 RPM gramophone records which were played on gramophones.
Like Arjun’s son, Abhimanyu (of Mahabharat) learnt about Chakravyuh in his mother’s womb, I learnt about Indian nationalism by listening to records of battles of Bhagat Singh with the British. And there were many unsung heroes of Bharat Independence. Unfortunately, huge credit for India independence is wrongly attributed to Nehru and Gandhi. But that story some other day.
Trip to India
As the Lufthansa Airlines Airbus 320 glided towards Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi, it was a milestone in my life. This was a flight from Frankfurt, Germany, around midnight of October 20, 2003. Fate destined that I, with my wife Shashi Kala Singh were passengers on that flight. I was filled with emotions and unprecedented feeling of delight.
I had pledged on the burning pyre of my father that one day I would visit my grandfather’s birthplace, to trace my roots, and also visit the places that we only read in Holy Scriptures.
The land we looked upon with awe and reverence, and called Bharat Mata .
As I stepped out, I knelt down there and picked some dust and anointed on my forehead. This was the earth where Ram and Krishna treaded, and so did my Aaja, (paternal grandfather) Bansi. And the land we only knew from Bollywood, and little bit from my Girmitya grandfather. This was his birthplace.
I had good and exciting memorable times in tracing my roots to my lineage and the land of Prithvi Raj Chauhan, near Jaipur in the small town of Karouli.
Pride and disappointment
I was saddened to see that the economic development and progress in India has failed to reach remote areas, as sections of the country is gripped in poverty, with deep division in the then leaders.
Karouli is very close to Vrindavan, Mathura and Taj Mahal, and near stronghold of dacoits like Gabbar Singh of Sholay fame, near Chambal Valley.
During her visit to Fiji in 1981, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had good advice for descendants of Girmityas. She told us that Fiji was now our country, hence we belonged there.
As a result, we owed allegiance, loyalty and love for our country, Fiji.
Nationalist leaders and others around the world should gain immensely from Indian history and the way of life. Ethnocentric Anglo Saxons, Europeans and other ignorant people who still regard India as a land of snake charmers and rope tricks need to see Akshay Kumar’s Bollywood movie Namastey London. (Greetings to London).
They need to get a translation of episode where the protagonist Akshay Kumar, shuts up the great grandson of an English East Indian Company employee who was running down India and its people. By clasping his hands, Akshay says: “When we Indians greet each other in the tradition of five thousand year-old civilisation, we fold our hands close to heart in Namastey (greetings) because we believe that God resides in the heart of every human being.”
Unity in diversity
We come from a nation where we allow a lady of Catholic Religion (Sonia Gandhi) to step aside for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn as the Prime Minister by a Muslim President (Abdul Kalam) to govern a nation with over 80% Hindus (India).
English is spoken and read more widely in India than in England.
India has 5600 newspapers, 35,000 magazines and 21 major languages with combined readership of 120 million, many more than in England. We have reached the Moon and back but yet many Anglo Saxons still feel that India has reached only as far as gourd flute of snake charmers.
We have the third largest pool in the world of doctors, scientists and engineers. All these are of the details of our intellectual might, now look at our physical might.
May be the English grandfather did not tell them that we have the third largest army in the world, and even then Indians clasp their hands in humility because they do not believe that they are above or beneath any individual…..end of the lesson.
So, next time you are confronted by an ethnocentric individual who runs down your Bharat Mata, you repeat the above to silence them.
The legacy or lack of it
But how true are those dreams and future that Jawaharlal Nehru uttered some 70 years ago to the date?
The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity.
The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us but as long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over. And so we have to labour and to work and work…
Unfortunately, Nehru and the Congress Party legacy has left India bereft of dignity and many things he promised over seven decades ago. For, 73 years after Independence, the Congress leadership is left with much to be desired.
Modi, the real Leader
Thank God, the Lion of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, who is seen as an incarnation who will rid India of the vices that have been nurtured by India’s past corrupt and wanting leadership. India needed a nationalist leadership movement that has been long overdue. It appears to be delivered now.
And that work shall continue under a credible leadership that took 70 years in coming. And we are proud that India today is in better hands than ever been so.
We pray that he will be able to wrest back the dignity that India once had. The economic development of the last 73 years has not trickled down to the common people. There is a lot more that needs to be done, where social justice needs to be delivered to all Indians.
And as we raise the Tiranga, the tricolour flag of India, we pledge to emulate the dreams of our freedom fighters who brought independence to India and many unsung heroes who outnumber many Nehrus and Gandhis, and who paved the path for an independent Bharat long before them.
Nehru and Gandhi merely walked on the path paved by many unsung heroes and freedom fighters before them, some notable ones, among others being Mangal Pandey, Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azaad, Shivaram Rajguru, Sukhdev Thapar, Subhas Chandra Bose And Jhansi Ki Rani.
Indian History appears to have forgotten and ignored.
Thakur Ranjit Singh is a third generation Fiji Indian. He was born and raised in Fiji, the country to which his grandfather Bansi was taken as an indentured labourer in in 1915. Thakur is a media commentator and journalist who runs his blog, ‘Fiji Pundit.’ He lives in Auckland. Email: thakurji@xtra.co.nz.
