26 INDIATODAY AUGUST 19, 2019
high. Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were fearless because
of their love of India, of India’s self-respect, her dignity. When
young Vinayak Damodar Savarkar slipped away from his boat
off Marseille to escape arrest for patriotic—read ‘seditious’—ac-
tivities; when Matangini Hazra fell, shot, not letting fall from
her hand the tricolour of freedom she was holding, they were
powered by the same emotion. And we have Netaji Subhas
Chandra Bose, the very personification of that patriotism of
love. Sugata Bose tells in his biography of Netaji how the young
Subhas asked his mother: “...will not any son of Mother India,
in total disregard of his selfish interest, dedicate his whole life
to the cause of the Mother?”
When the 24-year-old barrister, clutching his first-class
ticket, was thrown out of the train in Pietermaritzburg station,
a sense of his Indian-ness rose like a volcano in Mohandas’s
being. As the train, which had ejected its lawful occupant,
hissed out of that South African station, it did not realise that
it had just begun another quick-moving train, a railgaadi that,
in Harindranath Chattopadhyay’s pulsating song, was going to
chhuk-chhuk-chhuk-chhuk a historic chain of movement after
movement—in Passive Resistance, Non-Cooperation, Civil
Disobedience and, finally, Quit India, to be led by Mahatma
Gandhi for Swaraj, and not just for that of India but for colo-
nised people across Asia and Africa.
I
n that progression of the struggle grew a crucial,
defining nuance: the disobedience was to be civil,
civilised and civilising. It was to be completely, even
self-denyingly, non-violent. And why so? For if it did
not, it would corrode itself, invite counter-violence,
end in the destruction of its body, mind and soul.
Today, we may well ask: Is our patriotism about love, simple
love, of India and of Indians’ ‘tryst with destiny’? Without doubt,
it is. One glimpse of the pride with which India saw Chandra-
yaan-2 launched on July 22 will tell us that is exactly so. As will
the landing around the moon’s ‘south pole’ on September 7.
But is that love of India about a love that is whole, healing
and hateless?
Now we can talk, a relieved india today may say to me. You
are late to come to this question, but, yes, now we are on track.
Love with hate. Those two are today two sides of the same
country. Two fervours in one vein, two emotions in one heart—a
most unnatural and unhealthy state for a Republic to be in.
This is, of course, so not just in India, but in many countries.
For the terrorist, love of ‘the cause’, hatred for ‘the cause’s en-
emy’ and vengeance are a creed. The men who flew their planes
into New York on 9/11 and who sneaked death into Mumbai on
26/11 loved hate. As did, we may be sure, the young man who
blew himself up with 40 CRPF personnel in Pulwama.
Their types, medieval in brutality and modern in technol-
ogy, exist the world over. They can be expected to strike repeat-
edly, at targets as ‘hard’ as state arsenals and as
soft as social carnivals. Nation-states have to
fight them with the speed of light. With nation-
society’s—our—understanding and backing of the
nation-state.
But suspicion, strife and hate within us have
morphed the legacy of our independence struggle
into something altogether different. It has given
hate-lovers and love-haters a new vocation in life
today, an ideological, intellectual, political, cultural
force. It types history, paints geography, sculpts
politics. It seeks and makes heroes, it needs and
finds villains. And it is celebrating a new heroism—
from forest cell-hole, mosque and temple alike.
Who is loved today, passionately, in the name
of patriotism?
The man who vows revenge.
Who is hated today, passionately, in the name
of patriotism?
The person who speaks for humanity.
Who gains by this?
The terrorist, the house-divider, the nation-
splitter, the power-hungry.
What suffers?
The Republic, as Ambedkar envisioned it.
In his Kalinga Edict II, Asoka says: sa me
paja—all people are my children.
Saffron and green were not divided but held
together by the white in our tiranga, with the blue
of Asoka’s wheel of dhamma at its centre. Every
time Jawaharlal Nehru unfurled that flag on the
Red Fort, he looked at its quickening flutter with
rapture and—love. Jai Hind!Gopalkrishna Gandhiis a diplomat and
the former governor of West BengalTODAY, LOVE AND
HATE ARETWO
SIDESOFTHE
SAME COUNTRY.
TWO FERVOURS
IN ONE VEIN, TWO
EMOTIONS IN
ONE HEART—A
MOST UNNATURAL
AND UNHEALTHY
STATE FOR A
REPUBLIC TO BE IN