We have a choice. We can continue our daily struggle under the failed system or we can lead the change. We can let the suicide continue – as it has for the past 70 years ago. Or we can rise to stop it, and give birth to a new India, one that our forefathers would have imagined during the struggle for our freedom.
We need a modern Quit India movement – to reverse the wealth destroying interventions that have looted 90% of our riches, to create a new India where it is not the citizens that serve the politicians but the other way around, and to finally add economic freedom to the political freedom that was handed to us in 1947.
It is still not too late. The story that began in 1857 did not end in 1947. The final chapter is still to be written. With governments across India increasing their presence in our lives and businesses, with prosperity becoming more and more elusive for the masses, with individual freedoms being curtailed through legislations and fear, with social and economic mobility becoming harder as small- and mid-sized businesses are crushed, the virus has brought forth a question we have ignored for long – what is the India we want to create for our children?
Swatantrata (independence) without Samriddhi (prosperity) is a battle not even half-won. We must not rest till every child, worker, entrepreneur has been truly liberated in our country. The good news is that it is possible – because India is rich, even as Indians have been kept poor. If enough of us come together, a peaceful political and economic transformation is possible – not in a generation, but before the next election.
This Indian Revolution must begin in our minds. We must begin by replacing the dated romantic ideas of what creates prosperity with the evidence-backed reality of what actually does. Each of us must be a node in this networked spread of new ideas. We must set aside differences of caste, class and community that have been used to divide us. We must unite to set India in a new direction, to choose a different future. The only questions we must ask are – If not us, who? If not now, when?
