It is Republic Day today.

It is customary to invoke the past, recount the heroes that made sacrifices in the struggles against colonial masters, and count the blessings we enjoy today.

The past is always a mixed bag for a country such as ours with an ancient past—it is not just the colonial era, we are dealing with legacies that are layered, each with varied textures and sensibilities. There are heroes we celebrate, and even to this day, bring to attention those whom history unfairly omitted.

There is never one definitive history. It is an amalgam of evidence, culturally shaped opinion, and moral stances of the times when it was written. It includes even imagined realities that are part of lore and appeal to the populace and acquire a quality of truthiness that serve specific purposes of today.

Consequently, heroes are cast as villains in certain milieux and the yo-yo of glorification–vilification is more a reflection of the times than the deeds of the actors themselves. Similarly, non-entities or those with no stellar role or contribution by some standards are pitchforked as significant actors as part of alternate histories rewritten to correct the errors and injustices of ‘history’, or to simply serve an agenda that can benefit from a constructed virtuous legacy.

It is not enough to recall the sacrifices of the many that gave us a nation, a set of ideals, and our freedoms. To honour those who sacrificed and preserve their gifts, we must stay vigilant to the threats to the rule of law and our rights. We need to unequivocally reject divisiveness and majoritarian politics that sow distrust, and either create new fault lines or exacerbate existing ones. This is the safeguard against creating new privileged sections, ghettoising some others, and distractions from the persistent core issues of poverty, unemployment, education, and healthcare.

Lately, we have been called an electoral autocracy. Doomsday prophets have suggested that our democracy is on life support. We may not agree or be alarmed, but there is less to argue with the proposition that there is much that need fixing and many many questions today that need attention:

• How do we reclaim our past without necessarily recreating it and deal with historical wrongs—real or imagined—without retribution in the present?
• How do we embrace a brand of patriotism that values multiplicity, dissent and dialogue, over strident assertions of a monolithic construction of truths, a past, a history?
• How do we become a people that stands for something rather than see itself only in opposition to another?
• How do we become a nation that doesn’t fear a challenge to handed-down taboos and dogmas, and doesn’t sow the seeds of a new set?  
• If we are not to be just producers and consumers, and the country, just a grand marketplace, are we willing to let the voice of our citizenship rise over the restraints as producers we put on our labour? That is, are we willing to be socially engaged political beings in word and deed?

I don’t have answers, but I believe it is important to have questions rather than treat all things as settled.

Image: Mr.xony, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons