Irony...a nation that is and once it was.

Yesterday, I received a very interesting forward, which pointed to an irony in India’s performance in recently concluded Beijing Olympics. It was in big red fonts as if it really wanted to ram home the message. It read as follows…

It's so ironical. India is a peace loving country but the medals we have won in Olympics are only in Wrestling, Boxing and Firing

This got me thinking…yeah, so very true. Why is this? Why? Why? Why?

And then, a thought came to me and hit me like a thunderbolt, which questioned the very basic premise that this so-called irony is based on. Is India really a peace loving country, which it once used to be? As much as my heart would like to believe, my mind doesn't allow me. Let’s see…

When we talk about India we are basically talking about we Indians, the general population. So if the people are peace loving, the nation is peace loving, agreed? If you not agree then there is no point in reading further.

Now based on above presumption, let's see if we Indians are peace loving? Some of the points we hear in favor of this debate are…

1. We never attacked any other nation in our history. We only defended our freedom or land.
2. We got our freedom through non-violence through Gandhis and Nehrus of the times.
   

And my counter argument is as follows…

1. We never attacked becoz we had, have, will always have, enough issues internally to kill/murder each other. You call this a peace loving nation?
2. We were peace loving people for a short time in our history but not anymore and even that was just becoz of one person - Gandhi. But now, almost half of the nation either despises his way of thinking or doesn’t know him at all. And to support point 1 above, he was murdered too.
   

And I cannot think of anything that would make me believe that India is a peaceful country, except it’s non-violent independence movement. And even that because of one man. Big thanks to him but, hey, who cares about him anymore, he is dead. Let’s strip him off from his achievements in public…seriously it can’t be just one man who takes all the accolades…can it? What if he paved a different path to our freedom and united a deeply divided nation? What if he was forced to take some wrongful (in hindsight) political decision? He is just too good/peaceful for this violent nation…let’s just shoot him. Do you want to talk to him before? Nah…shoot him and काम ख़तम्

C'mon honestly tell me where we a single nation anytime in last 1000 yrs or before that? Apart from may be those 90yrs (1857 to 1947) which sounds like a blip in long history of this nation.

Before British came in, we were happily fighting against and killing each other for either power, money etc. Do you call these individual states peaceful? Was there a one single nation ever before British?

After independence, have we been a peaceful nation? I can talk mainly about era I grew up in, which I know better than say 50's to 70's.

In a nation where solutions for most of the major conflicts are either swords, laaties, throwing stones, bombs, do you call a peaceful nation? Give me one example where we as a nation resolved conflict by sitting across the table to start with? It always has to be lot of bloodshed before common sense prevails. Either we ignore the conflict completely, or let it go out of hand before we start talking.

Take an example of some of the crisises of our times, like Karnataka-TN fighting violently for every drop of water, or Naxilites in Hyderabad and western states of the nation, or hindu-get-out-of-kashmir crisis. Or think back to Punjab crisis or Hindu Muslim crisis in Gujarat or non-maratis-get-out-of-Maharashtra crisis. And less we talk about UP and Bihar being peaceful states better it would be. Now, which states have I forgotten to mention? I am sure if I dig deep I can find recent violent history in each of them. And even if we find one or two state that is peace-loving (may be MP?) does that make the whole nation peace-loving? Shouldn’t we be ashamed of how low we have gone compared to those non-violent movement times?

On an ending note; the true irony of this post is even though author of this post comes out as a big fan of Gandhi or non-violence, his blog-site is named “stickin…” ☺