THE DEAFENING SILENCE OF A NOISY NATION

Though some Indians have prospered 77 years after independence, there has also been an alarming increase in hatred. We need leaders who speak up for everyone including neighbours

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LOOKING at the state of the nation after 77 years of independence, I will start by conceding that, compared with their parents and grandparents, millions of Indians are much better off today. Many travel to far continents, build second or even third homes in India for themselves and their families, and do other things their forebears could not have imagined.

That's one part of the picture. Grimmer parts reveal galloping unemployment, young people committing suicide, a frantic search for jobs anywhere in the world, even in war zones, and other hurtful realities. Let me highlight two troubling features that get poor notice.

The first is India's silence. "What?" Surely India is lively, bustling, noisy! Of course it is, and much of the audible energy is heartening. Some silences are admirable, too. Through meditation and yoga, some Indians not only transcend unwelcome sounds, they find spiritual advance. Yet there is a disturbing silence.

I speak of the silence from platforms of prestige when hatred and contempt towards particular groups of people is openly advocated, when the supremacy of the strong and the humiliation of the weak are brazenly demanded, and when even murder is explicitly asked for.

I used to hear such poisonous calls a long time ago. That was in 1946 and 1947, when I was a boy of 11 or 12. Growing up in Delhi and going to school there, I breathed the fumes of fury and folly that accompanied the partition of what then was the huge undivided province of Punjab until its August 1947 split into India's East Punjab and Pakistan's West Punjab. (Later, East Punjab would split into Punjab, Haryana and Himachal.) In relative terms, Bengal, the only other province that was cut into two halves, saw fewer killings in 1947, through Bangladesh's liberation struggle of 1971 would exact a great carnage.