SOCIAL RECAST
| Date :12-Nov-2019 |
THE interfaith meeting of leaders of various sects and communities convened by National Security Advisor (NSA) Mr. Ajit Doval is one of the outward expressions of the silent and enduring effort the Government has been making not for just a few months but for a stretch of 4-5 years since 2014. The most endearing feature of the meeting was that there was no dichotomy between its stated and unstated purposes, in the sense it had no hidden agenda that had to be worked out on the sly.
To explain the effort in other words, it can be said safely that the Government has been engaged in a serious exercise of a social re-engineering in a carefully planned manner so that the narrow, domestic walls that had kept the larger Indian society fragmented senselessly crumbled slowly but surely, so that the undesirable, uncalled for divisions that drove wedges through India’s social fabric were kept at bay, so that the acerbic national discourse assumes a softness that was so essential to build a strong sociology of New India. All that effort is being seen in evidence as the Government has scaled higher peaks of achievement in which the entire society -- in all its segments -- was called upon to take a share and stake.
The verdict of the honourable Supreme Court of India in the Ramjanmabhoomi case was the latest peak at which the entire social soul of India congregated in acknowledgement of a great process of social recast. The Ram Temple and the Babri Mosque were two points of great social discontent. Following a massive effort that involved patience and persistence, dignity of conduct and honesty of intentions, those two points were converted into points of national rallying. Let alone a few mumblings of dissent, the whole nation accepted the verdict because everybody was carefully made to acknowledge the importance of peace and harmony as the two most essential ingredients of an inclusive society in which mutual respect was the basic condition. No matter the politics that got woven around the issue, no matter the senseless political battle that took so much of the nation’s energies, all the segments of the larger Indian society demonstrated a rare maturity that was hardly in evidence anytime earlier.
The collective post-verdict national response of tremendous positivism was a grand consequence of an equally grand (but silent) effort to inject into social consciousness a greater sense of responsibility, a greater sense of unity that defied all sorts of deliberate cleavaging with the help of political tools. This social re-engineering became visible in the interfaith meet which Mr. Ajit Doval called in New Delhi on the very next day after the Supreme Court verdict. This is not at all an attempt to give credit where it is not due. Much to the contrary, this is an attempt to interpret the happenings in the most non-partisan manner.
This is an attempt to explain to the larger society what has been going on on multiple fronts in the country to build confidence that India’s greatness lay in its harmony, its ability of accommodation, its inclusiveness. The effort here is to explain how the larger society, too, responded most positively to the Government’s effort to weave harmony into the national consciousness. But the effort is also to place on record that such a massive social recast would never have been possible without the proactive and focused action by the Government, since ours is a wonderful model of representative democracy in which all forces and sources fountain into a spray of collectivism, a process that cannot be completed without the participation of the people in power. In fact, if the Government had not participated, nay led, in the process, nothing would have become possible.