This India is unrecognisable from the one I grew up in

The country I woke up to this morning is unrecognisable as the one I was born in. It has such a diminished sense of itself that it has set the meanest limits to decide who belongs and who doesn’t.

rvices, kashmir landline service, kashmir mobile network, Indian express — In Kashmir in 1974, we were taken aback when a couple of shopkeepers asked if we were “from India”. (Express photo by Shuaib Masoodi)

I got up this morning with the inexplicable apprehension that I had woken up in another country — unfamiliar, and somehow hostile. It was accompanied by a profoundly unsettling feeling of un-belonging, of being cast adrift. The country I was born in, in 1948, was a country torn asunder, but growing up in it I felt — even when very young, very immature — a sense of its difference from other countries. Was it that its own sense of its tryst with destiny spread to us through osmosis, or did we actually think that we had something unique to offer the world? An experiment that was bold and unattempted so far, an exercise in democracy and nation-building that was grounded in and built on principles that, politically speaking, were certainly new — non-violent co-existence, non-alignment, non-sectarian, non-communal, egalitarian, plural — in a semi-feudal society. That there was something we were aspiring to that was untested, but that it was a challenge we were equal to.