Home > 2025 > Dreaming the Republic | Sagari Chhabra
Mainstream, Vol 63 No 5,February 1, 2025
Dreaming the Republic | Sagari Chhabra
Saturday 1 February 2025, by
#socialtagsOn 26 January 2025 - Republic Day - one’s thoughts go back to those who fought for India’s freedom and those who framed the Indian Constitution. Having spent the better part of my life recording so many freedom fighters their faces and memories come rushing back to me. Freedom was oh! so hard won with blood and salt intertwined; the blood of the revolutionaries and those who worked under Bapu with ahimsa and satyagraha as a creed.
The Constitution under Bhimrao Ambedkar is an amazing vision document and a bulwark for independent India as times change with astonishing speed! There is no doubt that we achieved our hard-won freedom and made amazing strides as life expectancy was only 37 years before independence and now it has gone up to 67 years. However, millions of people still live below the poverty line and that is inexcusable. While so much is talked about economic reforms we must not forget that liberty, equality and fraternity are the cornerstone of the Preamble. So why not talk of political reforms, so that we are not ruled by goons, criminals and tyrants. According to the Association of Democratic Rights report, as many as 46 per cent of sitting Members of Parliament have criminal cases registered against them and 5 are identified as billionaires. Dissenters are being increasingly silenced and the freedom of press is in peril. The media has been imploded and the Working Journalists Act dissolved, so many who speak and write are either harassed with income tax notices, raids by the E.D and even arrested under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. Now if the person is being prevented from an assumed crime how can you arrest him on an assumption, without so much as a fair trial and deny a man or woman his or her liberty without bail? During the Emergency, my father, Viren Chhabra who was responsible for printing the Statesman newspaper was visited by a policeman with a warrant for his arrest. He thought fast, knowing that in the Emergency there was no bail and proceeded to show a book of photographs by Raghu Rai of the Prime Minister, that he had printed. The policeman left with the book and without him. However, many did get imprisoned and the story still brings a chill down my spine for as a child I had witnessed what the taking away of civil liberties and press censorship could do closely. Democracy and liberty are the oxygen of the republic and everyone has a right to their liberty.
There is an open aspiration of becoming a trillion-dollar economy but at whose expense. A large number of our villagers are coming to cities in a mass exodus as the village which was envisaged to be a self-sustaining unit, has been leached of all its resources. During the pandemic, the plight of the migrant labour as they walked back, homeless and jobless from the cities where they had once worked, has been heart-wrenchingly etched in our psyche forever. But we seem to be heading towards a capital intensive, manufacturing model of high modernity and a western paradigm of development, regardless of global warming and climate change. Development has to put the people first; all the people.
A few days ago, a friend took me to a mall at Vasant Kunj. I have seen a mall, albeit from outside, even in the remote Himalayan district of Kumaon. All I wanted was a quilt. I still have memories of the razai wala and the twang his instrument made that fluffed out my razai. None of that now. I was seduced by a beautiful comforter and a coverlet and it was advertised as pure cotton. I bought it only to have a stuffed nose and a cough the next morning for while the cover was cotton, the comforter was filled with polyfills so different from the soft, downy cotton. The shoes were Italian and fashionable but I love my good old Bata and my roadside mochi for repairs. The mall was full; it was centrally heated and airconditioned; guzzling of energy and full of people buying, shopping till they almost dropped. They were buying more of what I had just been seduced into buying. This is how a large part of the Indian middle class now spends it weekends and has its food and entertainment treats. But what happens to those who live off traditional livelihoods in a sustainable manner; the local press-wallah who irons saris, shirts and uniforms, the chaat-wallah who gives you sumptuous papri-chaat and the nai who gave an oil massage and a hair cut all for a song with Mohammad Rafi playing on All India Radio on his transistor. Life was lived out with the people, for the people and by the people but now I see these mega malls and all that it speaks of and to is money. The obsession with getting my phone number extorted so I could get ‘a receipt in case I wanted an exchange’ is explicable only now, for I am being deluged by sales advertisements.
WE THE PEOPLE are no longer citizens but consumers and are being CONSUMED.
Earlier I saw the growth of amazing NGO’s; Ela Bhatt who started SEWA that organized women like rag pickers and vegetable vendors and gave rise to a SEWA Bank with so much dignity and self-respect for the poor women. I attended a SEWA conference as a college student where video training to these women was being discussed and Video Sewa was set up. Much later, when Elaben gave me her last interview in 2021, she pointed out towards both the camera-women, ‘let it not be forgotten that your mothers were head-loaders.’ She used to say, ‘we are poor, but so many’ and we have to work for a ‘doosri azaadi’ – a second freedom. Bunker Roy and Aruna Roy set up Tilona that gave rise to the Barefoot College – a veritable lighthouse on the Indian rural scene. We saw how artisans created their ware as we shopped and chatted with them at the Triveni haat and at the Dastkar mela. Aruna Roy later launched the Right to Information and Right to Food campaigns which gave birth to the Right to Information and Right to Food Acts that have changed the lives of millions and millions of Indians. All this was done with the help of many good-hearted citizens who could be called modern day satyagrahis, but are now dismissed as ‘andolanjeevis’ and even ‘urban Naxals’. What a change in lexicon! It is now extremely difficult to start and run an NGO because of a high level of compliances and old-fashioned volunteerism is just fading out. The middle class is heading to the mall to have fun!
The freedom to speak what I like, wear what I like and eat what I like is going away. One can now talk to friends on a zoom meeting and chat virtually and if one feels lonely can talk to a therapist. This seems to be a dangerous Western model for earlier life was lived out on the streets with the people. I do not see demonstrations at the Jantar Mantar where I once saw politicians of every hue being called names with impunity. So much protest was happening with Medha Patkar on a hunger strike and the Narmada Bachao Andolan and multiple other issues. Today the right to protest is being taken away; you can however go to the bar and have a drink. Witness the ‘videshi sharab’ signs everywhere including residential areas and even opposite the Deer Park where children play!
This is not the republic the Constitution makers had visualized. I dream of a Republic where we are free to speak and write without fear. Where one’s head is held high; where we are equal. I also want to see a pension for every senior citizen, particularly single women who are so vulnerable. I do not want to cringe with shame every time an elderly person puts out a hand at the traffic lights and little children without shoes as well. Elsewhere in the world, people get a pension not only well-heeled bureaucrats.
I also remember Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s vision. India was for all religions. It was Shah Nawaz Khan and General Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon who fought the British army in Burma against all odds. And oh! I do not want to hear of a single man being lynched. It causes me unspeakable sorrow. The civilization that gave the world Vasudeva Kutumbakam – the world is a family - must look after the life, liberty and dignity of each person on its soil.
Netaji had a futuristic vision for women’s empowerment by creating the Rani of Jhansi Regiment – the first all-woman military regiment in the world, training women to fight for India’s freedom. Gauri Bhattacharya Sen told me, that ‘the women signed a petition in their blood, saying they did not want to disband but fight for the freedom of their country’. It may be noted, that most of these women were from Southeast Asia and had never set foot on Indian soil but their love for their motherland was overwhelming. While dreaming the republic I want women to be able to walk without fear, and a children’s room in every building in the country, so that mothers are not deprived of living and livelihood, sitting at home protecting their children. I want a care economy, where the contribution of women in raising children, caring for the old and housework is accounted for and assessed in the GDP. We must include women’s work for women are not to be silenced and marginalized in a world of patriarchal, external authority.
India is a colourful, patchwork mosaic of so many dreams, sacrifices, languages, beliefs and desires. Let this be a republic of love not hate, where we live, love, eat and work together in peace under a beautiful, diverse razai that is India.
Jai Hind!
(Author: Sagari Chhabra is an award-winning author & filmmaker. She is the director of the Hamaara Itihaas Freedom archives (1995 – ongoing))