Those before us had less. But they gave more
Somewhere between that generation and ours, we changed the relationship. We stopped treating India as something we built, and started treating it as something that owes us.
It is crucial to recognise that Europe is not, and cannot be, a like-for-like alternative to the US in terms of sheer raw military projection or global financial hegemony. (Illustration: C R Sasikumar) Kartar Singh Sarabha was 19 years old when the colonial rulers hanged him at the Lahore Central Jail. He had already crossed an ocean, printed a newspaper, and come home knowing exactly what was waiting for him. Bhagat Singh was 23 years old. Madan Lal Dhingra, 25. Most of the men the Ghadar movement sent to the gallows were farmers’ sons from the villages of the Majha, Doaba and Malwa regions who could not have told you the first thing about political theory. They decided that some things were worth more than a life.
I want to begin there today because we have got into the habit of thanking our freedom fighters in the abstract — as though they were a category in a history textbook rather than young men with names, families and dreams, born in villages that many of us still drive past. Punjab paid a heavy price for this freedom. At Jallianwala Bagh, in the Ghadar trials, on the Komagata Maru, in the ranks of the INA. And then again in 1947, when the freedom we had bled for arrived as a line drawn across our own house. Millions were uprooted; families broken; a province cut in half, and its people made to walk out of homes their ancestors had built. And here is the part we do not say often enough: They did not become bitter. They arrived in Amritsar, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, and Firozpur with nothing and started again. They ploughed, traded, drove trucks and sent their children to school. They fed this country during the Green Revolution, and guarded it on the borders. Not one of them asked what the nation was going to do for them.
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