Intervention

Tarun Vijay on Band-Aid nation*

A nation living on a self-denial mode can never defeat gun runners. A polity that declares Ishrat Jahan innocent even before a police enquiry begins, which allows secessionists in Nagaland to open and run their 'free republic' headquarters and celebrate 'Independence Day' separately, which turns aliens into voters, thrives on a self-obsessed people who remain as engrossed in their routine of earning and dying as they were in the East India Company's babudom.

Strong nations move on their heritage and civilisation, whether it's Russia, China or the United States. They know who they are and who the enemy to their existence is. But here, we have a state which tries to de-recognise its civilisational moors, rather demoralises the patriotic forces ( from Kashmir to Kohima) and sleeps with the foes of our ancestral past so much so that we love to honour the memory of a bigot like Aurangzeb, the ideological 'great grand pa' of today's Taliban, by naming a major road in the Capital after him, but fear to honour Dara Shikoh, the learned scholar of Upanishads and a bridge of love between Muslims and Hindus( Japanese PM Abe quoted him in his address to Indian Parliament recently). Dara Shikoh was jailed and killed by his brother Aurangzeb and his grave lies unheard, uncared for in the precincts of Jama Masjid, New Delhi, where even the fashionable heritage-walkers of the NDMC-Habitat variety do not visit. [TOI]

*I have read this term somewhere earlier, though can't recollect at the moment