Quit India to Quiet India: The Unfinished Journey
Aditya Dhaka, 10:12 AM It is one of the enduring paradoxes of our republic that the day marking its greatest emancipation also foreshadows, albeit unwittingly, the slow erosion of the freedoms it proclaims to celebrate. Independence Day arrives each year, not merely as commemoration, but as a mirror, reflecting a nation that has travelled from the roar of Quit India to the hush of Quiet India, from defiance in the streets to obedience in the squares. For the truth is this: we did not inherit freedom fully formed, but an obligation to guard it — an obligation we have, in recent years, been derelict in fulfilling. We speak of liberty in speeches and textbooks, whilst tolerating — even applauding — laws and actions that shrink its scope. The colonial masters jailed dissent in the name of the empire; our own now jail dissent in the name of the nation. The vocabulary has changed, the instinct remains. It is, perhaps, the greatest irony of our times that the silence once imposed upon us...