As a rather inadequately educated Madrassi, it took me sometime to figure out the meaning of the word “aatmanirbhartha”. It took a friend ...
As a rather inadequately educated Madrassi, it took me sometime to figure out the meaning of the word “aatmanirbhartha”. It took a friend to help me to understand that it meant self-reliance. Being self-reliant as an individual, as well as a nation has been an important part of our national discourse and also standpoint. Good, so be it, I thought.
But into this resolve, dear little Greta Thunberg has broken in. We are after her. We have made her persona non-Greta. We have associated charges of criminal conspiracy and promoting enmity with a tweet that she made in support of India’s farmers who are protesting the new agricultural laws. We have damaged the aatmanirbhar shield with which we were protecting ourselves.
Self-reliance was a strong and highly practiced idea in free India, right from the beginning. If we look at Gandhi’s exploration of swaraj, it is all about aatmanirbhartha: make your own cloth, eat your own field-grown food, trade amongst yourselves, move away from dependence – a wonderful message to build self-confidence, to affirm identity as well as to feel secure against yapping from the outside.
New education
As someone who has lived in the decade of the 1960s and onwards, the dialogue between building a self-reliant...
