TOWARDS AN ADVANCED NATION
Result Oriented Work
INDIA, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country (with 1.34 billion people), and the most populous democracy in the world. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast. It shares land borders with Pakistan to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the northeast; and Myanmar (Burma) and Bangladesh to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives. India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand and Indonesia.
India has become one of the fastest growing major economies and is considered a newly industrialized country. It consists of 29 states and 7 union territories. It is a pluralistic, multilingual and multi-ethnic society. Maulana Wahiduddin Khan shares his wisdom regarding a few of the challenges faced by the citizens of this country and hopes that if we all work together in unity in spite of our differences we could be an advanced nation.
The Solution to Corruption
Every Indian complains about corruption, but no one tries to get to the root cause of this phenomenon. The Gandhian movement in the first half of the twentieth century was, in a sense, an anti-corruption movement. In the mid 1970’s Jayprakash Narayan’s ‘total revolution’ was a strong movement against corruption. Then followed V.P. Singh's movement in the late 1980’s and the fourth in this sequence was Anna Hazare’s movement in August 2011. The criterion to judge the success of these movements is not the crowds they draw, but the results they produce. It is an undeniable fact that in terms of results, all these previous movements completely failed to achieve their declared goal.
All these anti-corruption movements made their demands from the system. But it is not the system that is responsible for corruption; it is the human mind.
To eradicate the corruption we see today, we need to re-engineer individual minds. This requires a spiritual campaign. We need to replace the money-oriented mind with a value-oriented mind. We need to make people believe that money is a need, and not a goal. People’s concern for the self needs to be replaced with concern for the nation. To eradicate corruption, we have to give individuals a goal greater than money, just as to shorten a line, you only need to draw a longer line next to it. In the same way, to eradicate corruption, we should have a higher goal of intellectual or spiritual development. In other words, we have to replace money as a goal with wisdom as a goal. Although it is a long process, it is nevertheless the only process that can produce results. There are no shortcuts.
To eradicate the corruption we see today, we need to reengineer individual minds. This requires a spiritual campaign.
Anti-corruption movements generally demand the enactment of anticorruption laws. We already have anti-corruption laws. But these laws have obviously failed to eradicate corruption. Why? Because without implementation, laws are just words on paper. Laws can only be implemented by people. These people have to be persons who are not corrupt and who possess full authority. People such as these are the rarest of the rare; they seem to be non-existent. Had such people existed, the laws we have would have been sufficient.
The pursuit of wealth will only lead to discontentment, while the pursuit of wisdom will always lead to contentment. Only the content can abandon corrupt practices. To achieve this goal, we have to address individual minds, not attract crowds. A spiritual revolution cannot be brought about by a mob.
And, it is only a spiritual revolution that can root out corruption in our country.
Expectations from Media as a Tool of Social Reform
It is said that media is a powerful tool for ushering in social reform. It
is certainly true that the media has achieved the status of the greatest
industry; it is present in every home, big or small. But there is no social
reform. Everyone complains about the deterioration in human and
social values. Why this failure of media in bringing about social reform?
In spite of great expansion, the media has had little positive effect on
our present society.
The reason lies in the very nature of media. The subject of media is to write instant history; it has no interest in the past or the future. The sole focus here is what is going on in the present. Due to this nature of media, it has failed to bring about any positive change in society. Thinking about the past means taking lessons from previous experiences. The past is full of experiences and every experience has a lesson; but when we are not interested in the study of the past, we deprive ourselves from such lessons, and thus from reassessing our lives.
On the other hand, the future means thinking about tomorrow. The best planning is only one that is future-oriented, but the media has no interest about future events either.
Dialogue is not a meeting of rivalry but is a brotherly meeting. Such noble tasks are performed by rising above the victory-defeat psychology.
In such a situation, the media simply becomes a source of intellectual enjoyment on a daily basis. One who is engaged in it—both, in print and electronic forms—can only think about the present and their formula of life becomes, ‘right here, right now’. This state of mind makes them self-centred; they cannot think about social values. Social betterment needs a mind that is sociallyoriented, but people of the above kind live with a self-oriented mind, and such people cannot play any role in social reform.
Another aspect of media is that it is not a mission; media is an industry. This nature of media makes it unsuitable for playing any role in terms of social reform. Social reform is a mission, it cannot be a business. And media, being an industry, like any other business organization cannot play a significant role in terms of social reform. This is not a value judgement about media; it is simply an objective assessment.
A Good Society
A good society is the cherished ideal of every human soul. But a
consensus has yet to emerge on what constitutes a good society. This
is undoubtedly one of the most complex questions facing man today.
It would be no exaggeration to say that three major initiatives,
designed in their separate ways to offer a solution, have been utter
failures. A hundred years ago it was generally assumed that the setting
up of a national government would provide the answer. It was felt that
foreign rule was responsible for the rot that had set in society, and that indigenous rule alone could set matters right. In 1947, we finally
succeeded in establishing a national government, but it failed to yield
the desired result of a good society.
Similarly, the initiative which led up to ‘Home Rule’, i.e. the non-violent movement started seventy-five years ago by Mahatma Gandhi, did not usher in any utopian ideal. It had come to be assumed that once the principle of non-violence became the mainstay of Indian politics, it would automatically be put into practice in society. But this transference of a principle from the political to the social sphere did not take place. We may have been successful in launching a political movement based on non-violence, but we were to find that it took more than earnest enunciation of the principle of non-violence to build a good society.
Our basic shortcoming is to think purely in terms of systems. This has caused us to devote all our attention to overall ‘social reform’, at the expense of the more worthwhile ‘reform of individuals’.
The third initiative, carried out after independence, was the attempt to bring about a good society by legislation. There are now scores of laws aimed at social reform, each social evil having several specially framed laws to counteract them. But this multitude of laws has done little to bring a good society into existence.
As seen, our basic shortcoming is to think purely in terms of systems. This has caused us to devote all our attention to overall ‘social reform’, at the expense of the more worthwhile ‘reform of individuals’. Over a period of a hundred years, all the major movements launched in our country have been system-based, rather than individual-based.
The individual is the primary unit of society. If individuals are reformed, society follows suit. And if individuals degenerate, society too goes into decline. That is why our best efforts should centre on the individual, who is, after all, the basic building block of society. The day we reform individuals in their thousands, we shall have set ourselves well and truly on the path of successful social reform.
The solution to our problems lies in inter-community meeting, instead of protests and demand meetings with the government. The most urgent need of today is to hold inter-community dialogues at a national level. Serious-minded and influential people from all communities should participate in these interactions. Their goal should be the securing of peace on the basis of purely non-political grounds.
Representatives of all communities should hold discussions with open hearts. They must strive to put an end to controversial situations on all sides and should discover a common basis by adopting which, all communities can live together as good neighbours.
A dialogue of this kind is exactly in accordance with the Islamic Shariah. The Hudaibiya peace treaty in Islamic history is an instance of a successful dialogue of this nature. After the Prophet’s emigration, relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in Arabia considerably deteriorated. A number of battles and skirmishes ensued, and walls of prejudice and hatred barred them from coming closer to each other. Finally, peace could only be established at Hudaibiya near Makkah in 628 AD, through peaceful negotiations between the Prophet Muhammad and the non-Muslim Makkan leaders.
If such a dialogue is held with full justice and sincerity, a new chapter will be opened in the history of India. It is this point of inter-community relationship where the history of India is standing still. Once this problem is solved and relations between communities improve, nothing else will come in the way of India’s progress.
The dialogue, if it has to succeed, should not take the form of polemics. Representatives should not become spokesmen of their respective communities during the discussion. What should be uppermost in their minds are the larger national interest and the paths of progress and harmony for all.
All parties must commit themselves to differentiating between issues and non-issues, so that they will not hold anything as a matter of prestige; that they will not adopt the way of claim and counter-claim; that they will speak only with a vision of the result before them; that their way will be one of impartiality; that while pressing their demands, they will also be willing to concede; that while taking from others, they will also be willing to give.
Dialogue is not a meeting of rivalry but is a brotherly meeting. Such noble tasks are performed by rising above the victory-defeat psychology. Its aim is to solve matters and not confound them. The feeling at work behind a dialogue is one of reconciliation and not one of rivalry.
Dialogue means, an attempt to solve controversial matters through negotiation; rather than, through confrontation. If a dialogue is started with this spirit, its success is certain. The door to the progress of our country has been shut for about half-a-century; and a dialogue keeping this spirit in view, can surely open the closed door, provided it is conducted with true spirit.