Governor R.N. Ravi on Saturday said that people with different social identities moved about freely in India hundreds of years ago without any restriction as it was “one Rashtra” and blamed western ideas such as the modern State based on rights and identity for creating differences among people in the country.
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Speaking at the book release function of Complete Works of Pt. Deendayal Upadhyaya, edited by Mahesh Chandra Sharma, chairman of Research and Development Foundation of Integral Humanism, at TAG Dakshinamurthy Auditorium in Mylapore, Mr. Ravi said: “Some Telugu people and Malayalis tell me they are migrants (in Tamil Nadu) and that they came here 300 years ago. Here, you have several thousands of Saurashtrians and lakhs of Marathis… people didn’t know any such barriers. They moved from one end to the other without any restrictions. It was one Rashtra but the new ideas…. the western ideas of a modern State based on rights and rights based on numbers… numbers based on your identity… identity based on who you are… just start finding the differences.”
Mr. Ravi said: “It was common to find differences when we look for them. I was in Nagaland where people say that there are 16 tribes. Actually, when you go there, in one tribe… if you start looking at differences, there are more than 30 sub-tribes and no two are in dialogue with each other. If you start looking in terms of differences, we are all different. This has done a colossal amount of destruction and damage to us. The result is today… the world is facing crisis like climate crisis, wars - visible and invisible - wars everywhere. Acute poverty, unacceptable accumulation of weapons of mass destruction – one accident – instable equilibrium… thanks to western ideas that have divided and sub-divided the people and the society,” he said.
Auditor S. Gurumurthy said that Deendayal Upadhyaya spoke about philosophies, society, the world, what connects the different dots and turns the human being a part of cosmic system. “Before 1969, politics in India was a great calling. It became power centric… it became a matter of business. It became a matter rooted in corruption,” he said and claimed that the split in the Congress resulted in it. Mr. Gurumurthy said that Mr. Upadhyaya spoke not just the society but also about the individual’s relations with the family, with the community…the larger society, the nation, and the world and the universe.