A Struggle for True Liberation

Mrittunjoy Majumdar Guha18 July 20191 min read2 comments

SOMALIA, Kismayo: In a handout photograph released by the African Union-United Nations Information Support Team 02 October, Somali youths pull donkey-drawn water carts past sacks of charcoal as a convoy of the Kenyan Contingent serving with the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) makes its way through the city of Kismayo. Kenyan AMISOM troops moved into and through Kismayo, the hitherto last major urban stronghold of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated extremist group Al Shabaab, on their way to the city’s airport without a shot being fired following a two-month operation to liberate towns and villages across southern Somalia and Kismayo itself. Shabaab had for years used southern Somalia’s charcoal industry to partly fund through high taxation, a brutal insurgency to overthrow the Somali government and impose a strict form of Sharia law across Somalia AU-UN IST PHOTO / STUART PRICE.

India attained its independence from the British Raj on 15 August 1947. Curiously, within less than a decade, it was back in shackles. The white sahab was replaced by the brown babu. The Viceregal Palace was renamed Rashtrapati Bhavan. Names of a few cities were desi-fied. Bombay became Mumbai, Calcutta became Kolkata and strangely Madras became Chennai! But certain structures of oppression and hierarchy in society still remained. Certain ideas of what it meant to be Indian remained. Ideas that created conceptual constructs that created philosophies and even politics. India was birthed in a chaotic backdrop, with Partition and its after-effects. Even as a fledgling country trying to make sense of itself, India never quite had a problem with the diversity of its constituents. Unity in diversity became a catchphrase and a cornerstone of what it meant to be Indian. Tolerance and pluralism came to India as easily as breathing was to man. Spontaneous. Simple. Founded on centuries, nay millennia, of assimilation and churning of cultures, philosophies, ideas and people.

And then the undercurrents of differences burst forth, breaking the dams of reason, tearing asunder the fabric of Indian society.

Read more about a Dharmic take on identity politics here: https://lincogle.wordpress.com/2019/07/08/a-struggle-for-true-liberation/. #Solidarity