THE WORD OF GOD

Is political independence alone the remedy of all ills? Before 1947, Indian leaders believed that the root of all the problems was political slavery, that India was an ‘enslaved land’, and that political freedom for the country, making India a ‘free land’, was the key to all sorts of goodness and welfare. And so, guided by this mentality, they focused all their energies on extricating India from political slavery and working for its political independence. After enormous efforts and sacrifices, in August 1947 this goal was achieved. Accordingly, independent India should have fulfilled Mahatma Gandhi’s dream of, in his words, ‘wiping the tears from every eye’. But exactly the opposite actually happened! Tearful eyes remained as filled with tears as before. In fact, the number of tearful eyes, far from diminishing, increased by leaps and bounds! And the most ironical thing about the entire affair was that while our leaders had thundered against our enslavement to Western colonialists and unleashed a freedom struggle against them, which entailed huge sacrifices, following Independence, highly-educated Indians began migrating in droves to the lands of the very same Western people! And so, our ‘best’ brains have left ‘free India’ and have gone and settled in the ‘imperialist’ USA and UK. Once, someone complained to an Indian who had settled abroad about this ‘brain drain’, about the fact that many of the ‘best’ brains of the country have migrated to the West. The non-resident Indian quipped in reply, ‘Brain-drain is better than brain in the drain!’ What this non-resident Indian wanted to say was that it was better for ‘good’ Indian brains to settle in the West than to stagnate and vegetate in the unfavourable environment of India. This one incident illustrates that this division between ‘enslaved land’ and ‘free land’ is not proper. If this division were indeed proper, it would never have happened that people would have turned their backs on a life of freedom in their own country and then voluntarily chosen a life of ‘slavery’ in some foreign country. How is the situation of India and Pakistan similar with respect to its people leaving their home countries and settling abroad? The Indian Muslim leadership prior to 1947 had a similar mindset as their Hindu counterparts of dreaming of political independence and ASK MAULANA Your Questions Answered