The nation’s slide into fear, hate and bigotry did not begin ex nihilo five years ago. It’s the climax of a hundred-year campaign against the kind and pluralistic ethos of the freedom struggle

A hundred years have passed since a battle was launched for the soul of this ancient land. At stake was the country we would together build after the British left our shores.

This was the time when Mahatma Gandhi returned from South Africa to join India’s freedom struggle. In his leadership of three decades, a majority of Indians — Hindu, Muslim and of other faiths — shared his vision of a country resolutely inclusive and humane, which would welcome people of every belief and ethnicity to be equal citizens with equal rights. This ideal lay at the foundations of the constitution of the new republic, crafted in the care of Babasaheb Ambedkar.

This goal was bitterly contested all these hundred years by the Hindu Mahasabha, founded around 1915, and by the RSS in 1925. Their vision for India was of a nation exclusively for India’s Hindu majority, in which Muslims and Christians would be ‘allowed’ inclusion only as second-class citizens. Though less explicitly enunciated, people of disadvantaged castes and tribal ethnicities would also be lesser citizens.

The turbulent combat eventually took a toll of over a million lives, including that of Gandhiji, and caused the largest cataclysmic displacement of human populations in history.

Today, we find ourselves at a decisive phase of this same battle. We are led today by men who have spent all their adult lives as staunch members of the RSS. They believe their time has come, to remold India into the muscular and resentful nation of their imagination.

I was born eight years after India won her freedom. I recall a childhood in which the idealism of the freedom struggle, although rapidly unraveling, still endured. We were raised without bigotry, taught to be thrifty and kind. Friendships across religion were common (though much less, I realize now, across caste). Our cinema, our poetry, music and theatre, celebrated our plural identities. It was an unequal India, but comfortable in its diversity, stirred with the hope of building a better future for all our people.

Today, my grandson is being raised in a worryingly altered India. From the time he will make sense of his world, he will routinely hear conversations of bigotry and exclusion, in living rooms, in classrooms, on his phone and laptop, on his television screen. He will join a section of the world that is complacent in its comfort and vulgar overconsumption, indifferent to the stark penury and want outside its doors.

India did not suddenly change in recent years. The slide started much earlier. In college, idealistic students of earlier batches had disappeared into the countryside to fight rural oppression. We fought against the corruption and authoritarianism of the Congress government and against the Emergency.

The 1980s saw vast fractures crack India’s plurality: calamitous communal massacres, regressive mobilization against the rights of Muslim women, a violent campaign to destroy a mosque in Ayodhya, to demonize the Muslim, and to construct a sense of permanent grievance in the Hindu people.

Like a sudden flash of brilliant light in a stormy night, the revolt led by students across the country has broken through the darkness. By refusing to allow their nation to be divided by hate, young people are challenging the government’s hubris. The movement might or might not sustain. But the fact that it has happened reassures us that our young have the moral fiber to seize the mantle. They will fight for the kind and equal country that Gandhi fought for a hundred years earlier.

-Harsh Mander