I saw a full page ad by the Government of India in a Hindi daily dedicated to BR Ambedkar on his birth anniversary last week. What it said in huge fonts in Hindi translates in English as, “Grateful nation pays heartfelt homage to Dr Ambedkar”.
I have serious problems with these words. Yes, Ambedkar did meritorious service to India and its people. There is no dispute over that. But can a citizen of a country, however great, become greater than the countryIJ How can India pay homage to any of its citizensIJ How can India be grateful to an IndianIJ What is India, anywayIJ What does this kind of homage paying really meanIJ Why is this variety of homage paying happeningIJ And why can’t most people find anything wrong with itIJ I will attempt to answer these questions here.
When the Ambedkar advertisement says “grateful nation”, I need to first figure out what exactly this “nation”, our India, is before I decide if it can ever be grateful to its citizen. I don’t know when the idea of India as a nation started taking shape. It is an issue of importance not just for historians but people from all walks of life. All I can say is all that stands for India today has existed in space and time much, much beyond the geo-political identity that emerged on 15 August, 1947 with what is commonly known as the Independence of India.
It would be a huge mistake to tie down the vastness and wonder of the India that exists as a nation State today to merely its existence as a nation State. India as a country that has existed for 66 years is not just what India really is. No way. Whatever exists as the Indian nation today is too huge to be just a nation tied to a birth in time and space. That birth of so-called Independence on 15 August 1947 is just a blip in the life of India. Too much is made of it, but it stands for just another bend in a journey that is truly timeless and universal in spirit if we honestly trace it on the maps of the world.
It is outright disrespectful to the sublime beauty of this journey to make any milestone related to time or space its definitive identity. And to think, even imagine that this India has to be grateful to any of its children! Yes, the simile of a parent-child relationship is quite apt when we talk of a nation and its citizens. Many nations are considered a father or a mother by their citizens. That kind of feeling comes naturally. India was Mother India, Bharat Mata, when the struggle for Independence was happening. This relationship fed a lot of passion in the independence movements.
It is understandable that kind of passion and relationship subsided from the day-to-day life of common people after Independence. But the inner truth and reality remain the same. When we say “India gratefully pays homage to so-and-so”, we are actually saying in terms of emotions that a mother is gratefully paying homage to her son for something he has done. The idea is not plainly preposterous, it is monstrously unnatural. Can you imagine any mother using that kind of language for her sonIJ I don’t think any mother in any civilisation, in any land of the universe, at any time in cosmic history, has said, “Son, I gratefully pay homage to you.”
It would be extremely shameful for both the mother and her son if some ungratifying circumstances make any mother say these words. Or if it is made to appear, as in the case of the Government of India ad on Ambedkar, that a mother, our India, our Mother India, is indeed saying these words. These words are soaked in the tyranny of the ego of people who have the gall to think and declare on behalf of India that it is indebted to its citizen. The ego can rise to any imaginary heights in its delusions of grandeur. The whole culture of personality worship revolves around these trips of numerous egos.
When a person installs another person on a pedestal, it is basically an ego saluting another ego. The ego can never think beyond itself. If it salutes another person, the salute is actually for itself. In a movie Nana Patekar worships his own image in a mirror. This is not absurd, this is the naked, bizarre truth of worship. The zeal of a person to lift somebody on his shoulders is actually the zeal to get his own self, his own ego lifted on the shoulders of others. The ego can only think of self-glorification, never the glorification of anyone or anything else. The ego is forever sunken in the lowliest inferiority complex. It is never inferior or superior, but always at par with all other egos. That is why the sense of inferiority of the ego is not simple or real but complex or imaginary. And this complex of inferiority takes the ego on all kinds of fancy trips, both real and imaginary. The ego wants to imagine it can become so great that its nation will one day out of sheer gratitude bow to it and pay it homage. As I have said above, this situation is pathetically unreal, a grotesque malfunction of fancy.
It is this fancy that can equate a nation with a person. That gives us statements such as “Indira is India, India is Indira” and “Hitler is Germany, Germany is Hitler”. When even that’s not enough for the ego’s hallucinations of superiority, persons are made higher than a nation and the nation starts paying humble homage to persons. And we then get the Government of India ad on Ambedkar. Neither India nor Germany is someone’s little coin that he can slip as he fancies into someone’s pocket. But the ego is a bundle of delusion and it can imagine all manner of things to hide and survive in its hellish world of fancies.
So what’s the big dealIJ Is there really something wrong with thisIJ Well, the chilling, nasty fact is, there is. If the Government of India officially makes India pay homage to one citizen, it means it officially places the whole of India, all her history, culture, wisdom, resources, people in submission to one man. It does not matter who that man (or woman) is. That man is just a symbol for the expression of the ego. The symbol can be Ambedkar, Shaheed Bhagat Singh, Indira Gandhi, anyone.
Through that symbol the ego wants to make a statement, it wants to declare how supreme it is. How unparalleled in supremacy. The Ambedkar ad is not innocent. It arises from the culpability that seeks to put everything in the world, including a whole nation, below one ego, one person.
That person is a mere reflection of the ultimate ambition of every ego to reign supreme. The ad is not humility, as it poses to be. It is arrogance raised to enormous powers, all tending to infinity.
The ad came and went looking very tender and noble. India did not notice the filth lurking below the flowers of homage. The ad was by the Government of India, chosen by we, the people of India. We saw nothing wrong in the ad because, very sadly, we see nothing wrong in our ego and its constant fixation to always be the best, first, highest, greatest. It’s a simple truth — if I am second to none, everyone has to be second to me. Does anyone want to be secondIJ That’s the supreme pain with the ego.
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