Did Tagore have a premonition that India would stray from ‘reason’ and ‘freedom’?

“Incessant striving” is the task for the future, said Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister on our first Independence Day.

In whatever way we’ve followed that in the last 74 years, neither substantially nor in full measure, we need to pick up the pace now. In 1947, India was a former colony that had been sucked dry and ripped apart bloodily at its moment of birth. We had to build up. And we did, in our own haphazard way, full of warts and flaws, but also achievement and hope.

But in 2020, we stand on the brink of ruin -- social, economic, democratic. Thanks in part to a rapacious virus. But thanks more than anything else to a rapacious ideology matched with a callous incompetent government.

In one of those terrible moments of irony, on August 14, 2020, the Supreme Court of India, the protector of the Constitution we adopted as a sovereign nation on January 26, 1950, took a remarkable step back from that role. By holding lawyer Prashant Bhushan guilty of contempt over two tweets about the functioning and role of the judiciary, the Supreme Court in its judgment suggested that it should be magnanimous but would not be because, “If such an attack is not dealt with, with requisite degree of firmness, it may affect the national honour and prestige in the comity of nations.”

Imagine, this is the Supreme Court which is supposed to uphold our fundamental rights as citizens of India including that most precious and most beleaguered right of freedom of speech and expression. Imagine, this is a Supreme Court which thinks that a couple of tweets about vacation time and about decisions of the judiciary which a senior lawyer think will harm democracy, affect not just Indian democracy in toto but our position in the “comity of nations”.

The Supreme Court of India may not remember, but earlier this year, the Solicitor General of India lied in front of it, claiming that thousands of Indians were not walking on the streets of India to escape hunger and loss of livelihood because of the effects of COVID-19.

The SC has not pulled up the Centre for these lies and at the time claimed that the SC could not be expected to believe news reports when the Government claimed otherwise. How was our national honour and prestige upheld in the comity of nations then? A Government that neglected and denied largescale human suffering that is visible to all and the Highest Court in the land that believed that lie?

How far can one go back? The anti-citizenship act protests? The denial of fundamental rights to activists and intellectuals who have been jailed for speaking against state oppression? The situation in Kashmir? The human rights violations on hundreds of Indian citizens? The permission to build a temple at a site where a criminal case against a destroyed mosque is still ongoing? How well do all these affect our “national honour and prestige in the comity of nations”?

Indeed, what we see in 2020 is that our fight against fascist forces, against regressive anti-scientific thinking full of religiosity and lacking in philosophical heft, against assaults on our democratic and constitutional institutions, have to become stronger. The need for incessant striving is now paramount. We cannot have “pillars of democracy” so weak that they cannot take criticism when criticism is our only defence.

When hope turns to despair, cliched as it may sound, the heart and the mind turn to Rabindranath Tagore and his immortal words in this eternal poem of aspiration. The beginning is classic but here in the second half we find the same exhortation for effort and clarity of mind:

“Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”

We cannot and will not be tied down by the egos of our “leaders” and those in high positions of power. The struggle for freedom that is celebrated on August 15 is not just against the colonial yoke. It is for individual freedoms, freedom against tyranny and freedom for sovereign citizens of a sovereign nation.

The last six years have demonstrated in a horrific way how such liberties can be torn from us if we are not eternally vigilant.

(The author is a commentator based in Dehradun. Views expressed are personal.)