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Last night I was reading a speech by India's current president Dr. Abdul Kalam. The following quotation by him impressed me:
In 3000 years of our history people from all over the world have come and invaded us, captured our lands, conquered our minds. From Alexander onwards. The Greeks, the Turks, the Moguls, the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Dutch, all of them came and looted us, took over what was ours.
Yet we have not done this to any other nation. We have not conquered anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and tried to enforce our way of life on them. Why? Because we respect the freedom of others.
That is why my first vision is that of FREEDOM. I believe that India got its first vision of this in 1857, when we started the war of independence. It is this freedom that we must protect and nurture and build on. If we are not free, no one will respect us.
He is right in saying that if we are not free, no one will respect us. But he did not mention why we lost our freedom, why is it that we were invaded and subjugated by foreigners.
India and the Indians were subjugated because we Indians did not realize the importance of unity, and of the great importance of military might.
While the Hindus were busy building their magnificent temples and in giving profound lectures about the theory of universal brotherhood and about how God lives within each human being, the foreigners were building their military muscles and they were sharpening their sword.
And when the Mughals came, when the European colonialists came, they found that the task of subjugating Indians was indeed easy, because the latter were so divided into numerous castes and spoke numerous languages.
While the invading armies were united under one ideology, and often under one holy book, the Indians argued with one another about which caste was superior. They argued that the Brahmins were superior to the trading caste. And the Brahmins argued that 'Tripathy' was superior to 'Tiwary' because the former surname had a touch of Sanskrit, which the latter lacked.
It is this kind of silly and divisive arguments that weakened the Hindus and it is most surprising that even today in some temples in America there are priests who openly talk about the superiority of the Brahmins, and so on and so forth.
Anyway the truth of the matter is that freedom can be defended only with the sword. A race that throws away the sword is going to get subjugated, today or tomorrow.
In an ideal society that we must build people of all faiths shall live in peace because the people shall be highly educated and they will not only know but also fully realize that all religions are different paths to the same power called God. They will fully understand the basic unity of all religions and they will think of themselves as Indians first and a Hindu or a Muslim, a Punjabi or a Bengali last.
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