Showcasing independent India’s maturation over the years in governance, reform, technology, development, progress and policy is an important aspect of the 75-week-long semi-sesquicentennial celebration of India’s independence that was kicked off on March 12, 2021. The celebration is scheduled to culminate in the 76th Independence Day festivity on August 15, 2022. As spelt out by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ‘Freedom Struggle,’ ‘Ideas at 75,’ ‘Achievements at 75,’ ‘Actions at 75’ and ‘Resolve at 75’ are the features of the celebration that is designed to embrace the ideas and feelings of over 130 crore people of the country. 

Among the five features of the celebration, I am concerned particularly about ‘Ideas at 75,’ because I am afraid that whimsical discourses of some of the prominent politicians in the recent years might become part of this notion of ‘Ideas at 75.’ Some of these discourses include discourses on the internet and satellite communication systems; stem cell; test tube and plastic surgery technologies of the Mahabharata times; engineering and guided missile technologies of the Ramayana times; Indian aviation technology before the Wright Brothers invented planes; Indian Yoga Vidya imparting ‘Divya Drishti’ that was conjectured to be instrumental in the invention of television; Indian nuclear science traceable to Kanad Maharshi; Indian yogic farming based on empowering seeds with positive thinking and enhancing the potency of the seeds by ‘paramatma shakti’; production of gold by the Indian humped cow with ‘swarnanari’ (gold artery); and the cargo cult science of the panchgavya panacea. 

How does one understand the rationale behind these discourses? I presume that the rationale rests in the naïve supposition that solutions to our problems and answers to our questions lie in our mythical and religious past. I presume that the rationale also rests in the obsessive predilection of certain jingoistic sections of Indian society for the exploits of our collective mythical past which they think can galvanize a bigoted nationalistic fervour in the county, thanks to the one quarter of the Indian population that is still illiterate and the larger sections that are poorly educated. This new-found version of nationalism, the jingoistic Indians seem to think, is capable of bringing home the desired political dividends to the divisive ideologues of the country.  

An illiterate and poorly educated population provides the most fertile ground for breeding politically motivated, hollow nationalism based on a nation’s mythical past, its pseudoscience, and its superstitious beliefs. India with its enormous illiterate and poorly educated populace, whose lives are guided more by cultural, religious and superstitious concerns and less by scientific and rational concerns, is highly susceptible to the manipulative clutches of politicians with vested interests.  

Here is an illustrative instance from West Bengal that is still fresh in our minds. In November 2019, after listening to the discourse of Dilip Ghosh, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Bengal chief, that the milk of the Indian breed of cows contains gold, a dairy farmer and milkman from the Hooghly district of West Bengal, went to the local Manappuram Gold Loan office with his cow and its calf, asking for a loan against it with the gold-laden milk as security.

I wonder if the French adage, ‘le législateur devient le transgression’, meaning, ‘the legislator becomes the transgression,’ or the Indian adage, ‘fence itself eats the crop,’ best depicts the Indian scenario at seventy-five. Will the Indian populace that has not yet forgotten the exotic elements of some of the fabulous discourses of Indian politicians in the recent years be wondering if these discourses will become part of the ‘Ideas at 75?’ I will not be surprised if they do. After all, the midnight birth of our nation was the synthesis of the dialectics of two related discourses — Western versus Eastern superstitions.  

Since it was on August 15, 1945 that the Japanese Army surrendered before Lord Mountbatten, the then commander of the Allied forces, during World War II, Mountbatten believed August 15 to be a lucky date for his career. Therefore, after the British Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act, 1947 in July 1947, as the last Viceroy of the British India, Lord Mountbatten was keen that the transfer of power from Britain to India should take place on August 15 that year. However, since Mountbatten’s preferred date fell on a Friday, an inauspicious day as per the Indian astrological calculations, the Indians had serious objections regarding the date. If Mountbatten was obstinate about August 15, his supposed auspicious day, the Indians were equally adamant about Friday, their supposed inauspicious day.   

The incisive Indian astrologers worked a way out of the impasse. They suggested that the transfer of power be done at the midnight hour between August 14 and 15, because, if the day begins for the Britishers at 12 am, for the Indians as per the Hindu calendar, the day begins at sunrise. Therefore, according to the Indian astrological calculations, the midnight hour between August 14 and 15 would still be Thursday and not Friday.   

Nehru’s speech of acknowledgement of the transfer of power, the astrologers had insisted, had to be delivered during the ‘abhijeet muhurta,’ the most auspicious 48 minutes between 24 minutes before and after 12:15 am, i.e., between 11:05 pm & 12:39 am. He was to end his speech by 12 am to announce India’s freedom from the British exactly at that moment. ‘Abhijit muhurata,’ they had deduced, was capable of fending off all forms of misfortunes. Adhering to the astrologers’ instructions, Nehru completed his speech within the stipulated timeframe and announced the birth of the free nation at 12 am.

Through some mysterious rite of magic realism, those 48 minutes made the impossible possible – while it ushered in August 15 for Mountbatten, it continued to retain August 14 for the Indians. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world slept, Britain and India parted ways, guided by analogous superstitions interpreted differently. Interestingly, the birthing of the Independent India was carefully contrived by and executed within the parameters of a discourse that is astrological and superstitious. 

In their book, Freedom at Midnight, Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre talks of how the word, ‘religion,’ supposedly inspired a sense of horror in the secular and liberal-minded Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, and yet how he allowed himself to be readied by the Hindu priests for the solemn historic occasion of India’s independence. “They sprinkled Jawaharlal Nehru with holy water, smeared his forehead with sacred ash, laid their sceptre on his arms and draped him in the cloth of God … he [Nehru] submitted to it with almost cheerful humility. It was almost as if that proud rationalist had instinctively understood that in the awesome tasks awaiting him no possible source of aid, not even the occult that he so scornfully dismissed, was to be totally ignored.” 

Dr. Rajendra Prasad, the first President of India, went many steps further in his adherence to what one may refer to as the religious or the superstitious: guided by his religious belief, in 1951, he washed the feet of 201 Brahmins in Banaras and drank the water.  

The recent pseudoscientific discourses of some of the current Indian politicians are nothing but a passionate perpetuation of a certain reactionary ideology writhing under the sway of religion, tradition and superstition. This ideology doggedly refuses to embrace a scientific, rational and liberal outlook even at seventy-five. Talking about freedom, Ambedkar said, “One who is not a slave of usage, customs, of meaningless rituals and ceremonies, of superstitions and traditions; whose flame of reason has not been extinguished, I call him a free man.” Since 1947, if only Indians as a people had been inspired and guided by the idea of true freedom, today, at seventy-five, we could have held our heads high among the nations as a country with a progressive present and a visionary future. I am afraid that at ‘seventy-five,’ we might come across to the world as the credulous, unquestioning and inflexible inheritors of a regressive mythical past.