Independence Day: Why the Sword Is Still Overhead

Today is the fifteenth of August. The tricolour is up on every gate and lapel, the anthem will play in the schools by mid-morning, and from the panchayat to the Red Fort, the speeches are already written. The feeling is real; a people has every right to mark the day it stopped being ruled.

And yet, even in the middle of this, one question tends to get buried every year, and it is worth raising precisely on this day.

India, or any other country in the world, at the moment of its founding, what is its condition, free or subjugated? Look closer. Take a single human being. What is his default, freedom or captivity? No human being is born anyone's slave. Nobody is born into bondage; it is always put on afterwards. And no one was ever taught to want freedom; that wanting is already in place at birth.

An animal in the forest is free, a bird in the sky is free. You catch the bird and put it in a cage; only then is it subjugated. Subjugation has to be manufactured; nothing is born into it. A nation is no different, and its natural condition too is freedom. The demand for freedom is not one demand among many; it is the deepest, and the first. What liberation is to a person, freedom is to a nation.

So what India celebrates on Independence Day begins to look a little strange. Freedom is the given; the more honest and more useful question is this: if everything is born free, where did bondage enter later? Was India always enslaved? No. Then where did the slavery come from? That is the question worth asking.

This is why I would want Independence Day observed as a day of self-examination. Eat the sweets of freedom today, by all means, but first ask how the bondage arrived, and whether it has truly left, or whether it still hangs over the country like a sword.

A Thousand-Year Anomaly

This slavery is not a matter of ten or twenty or fifty years: nearly a thousand years, sometimes a part of the land, sometimes the whole of it, under someone else's dominion. Whoever could come, came. From Europe the Portuguese came, the French came, the Dutch came, the British came; the only ones who did not come were those who could not, for reasons of geography. From nearby came the Afghans, the Iranians, the Turks, the Arabs. And mark something older still: when the Shakas and the Hunas came, centuries before this thousand years began, they were repelled or absorbed; Skandagupta broke the Hunas at the gates. There was a time when this land could answer an invasion. What changed after the turn of the millennium is that the defeats stopped being exceptions and became the rule. That change is the thing that must be explained.

Even while the British were installed, the Japanese dropped bombs on Madras itself, and more heavily on Vizag and Kakinada up the coast; the threat from the Andamans and Burma is well documented too. The Axis powers had already drawn their line through the subcontinent, the German sphere to its west, the Japanese to its east; the division of India was settled in Berlin and Tokyo before India had any say in it. And after independence, China walked into the borders and carried off land.

Something that happens once, or twice, you may call an accident. Something that continues for a thousand years, is that still an accident, or is there some deep structure behind it? People from so many different directions, of so many different nationalities, came again and again and defeated this land again and again; this cannot be merely a matter of others' cunning. Behind it lies a structural cause, an internal weakness, that has kept forcing the country into the position of prey.

And the larger question is this: a cause that persisted for a thousand years and kept the country enslaved, would it have vanished completely in seventy-five or eighty years? Not even a hundred years have passed since 1947. A thing that can hold for a thousand years, how would it disappear so quickly? If it is still present, then the danger is still equal to what it was; the sword is still overhead.

It is comforting to say that the British came, that Indians were simple, innocent people, and that outsiders sowed division and ruled. But division cannot be sown so easily. Where there is truth, where there is love, where there is dharma, division does not go in with such convenience.

The battle of Plassey was won by open bribery. It is not counted as a battle won but as a battle bought; the British, as has been said, bought the battle of Plassey. Where a man sells his conscience, his dharma, his country's interest for a bribe, the division did not come from outside; it was already sitting inside. At Buxar, three Indian rulers stood together against the British, and yet the self-interest, the mutual suspicion, the friction among them ran so deep that they could not truly become one. Each was watching his own advantage; none had any concern for nation, for dharma, for truth. The British defeated them again, and India still says they won by dividing. The truth is that where the selfish ego of lokdharma sits, sowing division is very easy for any outsider.

And let it be said plainly, because it must be said before what follows: this is not the complaint of an outsider. This land produced the Upanishads; it asked, before anyone else asked, who the asker is. Somewhere in its air there is still the memory of rishis who feared no question and worshipped no fear. The grief is exactly this, that a civilisation that once stood at the very summit of self-inquiry chose, somewhere along the way, the comfort of ritual over the fire of the question. No one grieves for what he does not love. What follows here is grief, not contempt.

So what is that cause? Political it cannot be; no political cause lasts this long. Coincidence it cannot be; that much is settled. The cause is cultural, something that has, by misfortune, dissolved into the air of India and settled there as culture, something held sacred and clung to.

I call it lokdharma, the folk-religion. Lokdharma is no external power; it is one's own ego, hardened into rite, tradition, custom and fantasy. It is the structure that merely looks like dharma, resting on Smriti texts severed from Shruti, on the Puranas and on ritual, while the real dharma, the Shruti-dharma of the Upanishads, of Advaita, of truth and freedom, stays far away. In the Sanatana order the rule is plain, that of the Smriti texts only what agrees with Shruti is to be accepted, and whatever does not agree with Shruti must be rejected. Lokdharma is ignorant of Shruti; it has taken the Puranas, the ladder of caste, ritual and folk-belief as the final truth. Where the very root of a religion lies in fantasy and fear, what price will fact carry there, or the question, or free thought?

Those who count the centuries of slavery most loudly are very often the most devoted guardians of the very lokdharma that caused it. They will avenge the invader and worship the weakness that invited him. Counting the years is easy; questioning the muhurat, the caste ladder and the horoscope is what nobody's pride permits.

The caste order made the sword the birthright of one caste and the duty of none. You sweep, you scrub the vessels, you cut hair, you plough the field; the sword is not your dharma. Men from every caste did fight, whenever armies needed them, but the society never told them that the defence of the land was their own sacred charge. Fighting remained an employment for most and a birthright for a few; it became a dharma for almost no one. A land where defence is a caste occupation rather than a common duty will always be defended by hirelings, and hirelings can be bought. Plassey showed what hirelings cost. And when most of a population has been shut out of ever becoming a soldier, a scientist, a policy-maker by right, where will an army find its most able people? Where there is no order built on merit, how will the strength of a nation ever take hold?

India says Krishna is its ideal. To hold someone as an ideal means living as he lived, understanding what he said, accepting it, bringing it into life. Had that been true, the Gita would already have entered the country's life. The Gita was spoken on the field of war, exactly where the choice stands between life and death, victory and defeat, throne and empire. The Gita says yuddhasva, fight. No anxiety about winning or losing, no concern for the throne, but do what is right, and do it without craving the fruit; struggle for dharma without a thought for the result.

One who had truly lived the Gita, how would he go soft so easily in battle? He would say, I can die, but I will not accept defeat; I will not let a handful of men settle over me. But this can only be said when dharma is present within. Suffering is not the disgrace; every people suffers. The disgrace is to stop resisting, for as long as a man resists, something in him has still not consented to his chains. India's failure was not that it suffered for a thousand years but that, again and again, it made peace with the suffering, found a muhurat for it, found a ritual for it, found a fatalism for it. India accepted defeat so easily because, in its heart, it knew that dharma was in any case absent from its life.

India is not a religious country; it is a folk-religious country. It accepted fear, superstition, division and self-interest in the name of dharma, and so it felt no hesitation in accepting its own defeat. This is the dishonesty within, the one that turns its face from fact and is afraid of the question.

Lokdharma, Knowledge, and the New Slavery

In the age when the powers of Europe were working out their exact position at sea, what was India doing? To know your place on the ocean, you need both latitude and longitude. Latitude could be had with reasonable skill and simple instruments; longitude could not, and without it you simply did not know where you were. To solve this, they researched for years, lost lives, and at last built the instrument that could give true longitude at sea, the fruit of the labour of laboratories like Greenwich. That same instrument helped carry them all the way to India. While they were racing ahead in astronomy, India was tangled in the auspicious hour, in bells and gongs, and is tangled there still. The world moves ahead in science; this country moves ahead in casting horoscopes. This is the very astrology that pushed India back; had India attended to astronomy, its defensive strength at sea and on land would have been something else.

In this same period Europe had its Renaissance, a renaissance of the freedom of thought. Universities were opening there, grants for research were growing, new technologies were being made. Here the public's money went mostly into tombs, minarets, grand temples and ritual. How many new universities appeared over the last eight or ten centuries, how many research institutions, is itself a question worth asking. Recall the dates. Bologna was teaching by 1088, Oxford by 1096; Nalanda was burnt around 1193, and for seven hundred years nothing rose in its place. The invader lit the fire once; the not-rebuilding, century after century, was India's own doing. And the habit persists: even today India spends barely 0.84 per cent of its GDP on research, against China's 2.6 and South Korea's five and more.

The guns, the ships, the vehicles, the trigonometry, the cartography of the European powers were all far ahead of the technology here. The intelligence of Indians is not less; it is that lokdharma sits on top of that intelligence. The money went into ritual, offering and display instead of into universities, laboratories and research. Where knowledge is not valued, what will arrive if not slavery?

You will have heard one name, Macaulay, from the time of the British. He made a jibe whose sting is still felt. He said that in the languages of this country there were, by his account, no books on any subject that deserved to be compared with Europe's own. He laughed at the astronomy here, saying it would move laughter in the girls of an English boarding school. At its medicine he sneered that its doctrines would disgrace an English farrier, a blacksmith. At the geography he mocked that it was made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.

He was insulting, and he had been handed the right to insult. Can it be denied that Indians had brought this ruin on themselves, and that this is why an outsider earned the right to mock? Macaulay said girls on purpose, to show that in England even girls study enough to know more than the great pandits and vaidyas here. And even today the new generation, men and women alike, goes to horoscope apps on their phones to have their charts cast. The rate at which women take part in India's workforce remains far below China's, and in the cities, where no field or farm can serve as the excuse, barely one urban woman in five is in the workforce at all. In China women step out to work, to build a nation; here a great many women are shut inside the kitchen and the bedroom, occupied with building families rather than building the nation. When you keep half a country's citizens under house-arrest and another nation sends all its women and men into the field, who pulls ahead is not hard to guess. Macaulay did not die; Macaulay is alive even now. He mocks this country in a thousand ways to this day, and that right, sadly, was handed to him by Indians themselves.

It is not as if slavery happens only by seizing land. Earlier, the way was this, that to enslave someone, you marched onto his land and seized his sovereignty. Today a society can be made subordinate through the drain of wealth, through deals, trade treaties, outsourcing and the inequality of knowledge and technology. When India was politically subject, the drain of wealth is well known. Today there is no political subjection, yet the drain of wealth continues, quite formally, through agreements and deals. The Global North is many times richer in per-capita terms; the dirty, polluting part of production often happens in the Global South. The emissions that Europe's factories and services show do not include the emissions they have had produced elsewhere. Add those, and Europe's true footprint swells well beyond what its ledgers admit; in some of its countries, half or more of the consumption footprint is generated on someone else's soil. The dirty work is done by other countries, the smoke and the pollution borne there, and the clean goods used by the citizens of Europe. This is the new kind of slavery.

Earlier, slaves were carried in ships in chains. Today you stand in line at an embassy for a visa and present yourself as a servant: the slave is here, my master, tell me what service to do. You drive a taxi in their economy and do the low-level work, while they do the high-end work, the research, the new technology, and create new knowledge. The dishes are scrubbed here; history is written there. India has almost everything, but for crude oil and a few rare-earth materials, and yet for crucial technologies it still has to look to others. For the most central engines of defence, for fighter-jet engines, there is dependence on imports. The indigenous engine project was sanctioned in 1989; more than two thousand crore rupees and three and a half decades later, there is still no engine fit to fly a fighter, and the Tejas flies on an American one. The world is reaching the sixth-generation fighter jet, and here there is not even an indigenous engine for the fourth. A war begins, and one day the supply is cut off, and then what?

AI arrived as a large opening, and that opening too has been all but lost. America and China built the frontier models; not one of the world's leading AI models has come from India. This country stayed crouched in the shell of safety that lokdharma prescribes, afraid of risk, afraid of the new experiment.

It is the same in farming. India takes pride in calling itself an agricultural country. And what are its actual distinctions in the field? It stands among the largest exporters of beef in the world, almost all of it water-buffalo meat, carabeef, and its cities crowd the top of the lists of the most polluted on earth. The big innovations have usually happened elsewhere: Israel built models of cultivation on barren land; the Japanese method of rice cultivation changed the understanding of paddy. Institutions like Pusa have certainly given new varieties and seeds, but the breakthroughs are few. All of this was done to itself; it is nobody else's conspiracy.

Lokdharma will not let you take risks; it will not let you become a risk-taker. It says, do as everyone has done, whatever comes handed down from behind is the best, keep repeating it. When the central instruction of life is imitation, where will creation come from? Whether it is AI, defence technology, farming or universities, the default reaction everywhere is that someone else should do it and this country will copy it, take the licence, rather than build it. This has become the national habit. The note of lokdharma says safety is the highest thing, like an over-protective mother forever stopping the child from going out, hiding him under the end of her sari. A society that will not give its young, its scientists, its women the freedom to experiment, how will it ever become a nation of any vigour?

There was a news item these days. At a temple in Madhya Pradesh, the religious observance of Independence Day was held on the eleventh of August, because by the temple's panchang the true tithi of independence fell on that day. The tricolour of the calendar on one side, the tricolour of the muhurat on the other. Nor is this a village eccentricity; the country's own stock exchanges open for a formal muhurat trading session every Diwali, the financial heart of the nation setting its books by the panchang. This is exactly the condition. The train may arrive at seven in the evening. You will still reach the station at ten at night, because your reckoning says the moment is now. The fifteenth of August is a fact, it is history. But there is no respect here for facts. My belief, my conviction, my fantasy, my astrologer, that is what I will follow. A country that gives no value to fact will give none to knowledge; and for a country that gives no value to knowledge, there is no surprise in its subjugation.

Today's Generation Z is buried in astrology apps too, and a market of thousands of crores in these apps is turning over. The same astrology that pushed this country back in the past feeds, even today, the fear and the ego seated within. Lokdharma is dominant still; its grip has not loosened, it has only come forward in new shapes.

A Day for Vigilance, Not Celebration

So on this Independence Day my request is only this: celebrate, but even amid the celebration, let the gaze turn inward for once. The sword that has hung over the country for a thousand years has not lifted yet. The danger is equal, the danger remains, and the cause of that danger is internal. The greatest enemy sits within, not in the house next door but in the very heart, in the very lokdharma. It will not come from outside; it lies in that inner dishonesty which turns from fact, is afraid of the question, walks by fantasy instead of Shruti, invests in ritual in the place of knowledge, and takes pride in keeping half the population locked in the kitchen.

And so, even as this Independence Day is celebrated, remember that vigilance has no single day. The festival is today; the watchfulness must be from today too, and every day after. This is not a matter of any declared result, of any medal of victory; it points a direction, and nothing more. Be careful, wake up. The direction is inward, and no one has promised a destination. Freedom asks to be lived as a responsibility rather than enjoyed as a festival; otherwise the sword stays where it is, and the next slavery, different from the old, will be no less deadly.

Acharya Prashant is a philosopher and author whose work centres on self-inquiry and its application to contemporary life; Views presented are personal.