India Patriotic Quotes

India has known the innocence and insouciance of childhood, the passion and abandon of youth, and the ripe wisdom of maturity that comes from long experience of pain and pleasure; and over and over a gain she has renewed her childhood and youth and age

The best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes to raising them.

Patriotism means to stand by the people, not to stand by the party.

Some of India’s most stellar appointments include H.D. Deve Gowda as prime minister, A.K. Antony as defence minister and Sharad Pawar as anything at all.

We celebrate Republic and Independence Days in India to remind us, that our country and its freedom is the result of sweat, patience, persistence, and sacrifice of those with the courage to dream freedom and make it a reality for their future generations.

Why are we so easily swayed by facts forwarded by email? Why do so many Indians believe that the Taj Mahal was originally a temple called Tejo Mahalaya? Why do so many of us instantly believe and immediately proselytize that ‘India has never invaded any country in her last 1,000 years of history’ or that ‘The word “navigation” is derived from the Sanskrit navgath’ without even pausing to ask: ‘Is any of this actually true?

Look, I get it. You can’t tell a joke without worrying you’ll lose your job. Your twenty-something can’t find work. Your town is boarded up. Patriotism gets called racism. Your food is full of chemicals. Your body is full of pills. You call tech support and reach someone in India. Bills are spiking but your paycheck is not. And you can’t send your kid to school with peanut butter. On top of it all, no one seems to care. You feel like you’re screaming at the top of your lungs in a room full of people wearing earplugs. I get it.

My Blood flows towards India ,bcoz India is in my Hear

India, the nation of Great Patriots

Dekhna nahin...karna hai...!

We are not killing, we are saving.......a billion dreams.

This abstract being, the Nation, is ruling India.

the India devoid of all politics, the India of no nations, whose one ambition has been to know this world as of soul,

It is my Bharatvarsha in all its glory, replete with wealth, knowledge, spiritual faith.

voice of the Congress was supposed to be the voice of sedition and of class ambition, instead of being, as it was the voice of educated Indians, the most truly patriotic and loyal class of the population. In

This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term.

Powell’s superiors at State had instructed her before she departed for Islamabad not to get into cabling wars with the U.S. embassies in Kabul and India over I.S.I.’ s conduct or other sources of controversy about Pakistan. But Khalilzad raised the temperature. In one cable, Powell felt that he had attempted to question her “loyalty and patriotism” simply because she had tried to describe Pakistan’s position of relative weakness in relation to the Taliban and the fact that the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan “has never ever been controlled.

By patriotism I mean the welfare of the whole people, and if I could secure it at the hands of the English, I should bow down my head to them. If any Englishman dedicated his life to securing the freedom of India, resisting tyranny and serving the land, I should welcome that Englishman as an Indian.

I am not SURE whether people have watched DID show from ZEE TV or not, Its big ambiguity that they have really liked Teriya Magar's performance or of anyone else. But I'm SURE that they have voted Teriya and even begged others fellows to vote her. This way patriotism rocks and talent is sucked........ - Anup Joshi

It must be said here that ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ is not an attribute of patriotism, but of deep patriarchy. Extreme mother-love is a camouflage for extreme misogyny. Over the past few years in India, the nature of the violence inflicted on women during rapes, riots and caste retributions is of an order seldom witnessed before in any part of the world, except perhaps, in Bosnia during the civil war, or in the Congo, or in Sri Lanka during the final moments of the pogrom against the civilian Tamil population there. From the barbarity of the jawans of the Assam Rifles on Manorama Devi, to incessant mass rapes by soldiers in Kashmir, to the graphic and horrific brutalities (that were videotaped) on even pregnant women in Gujarat in 2002, to the Nirbhaya case in Delhi, there is no evidence to prove that devotion towards an abstract ‘Bharat Mata’ translates into even a semblance of affection or respect for real flesh-and-blood women. Indeed, here it is only literally the flesh and blood that seems to matter. Add

A human, caught under the oppression of a foreign nation in his/her own country, can be willingly to risk his/her life in order to achieve freedom. To call this act a self-sacrifice, one would have to presume that the person didn’t mind living as a slave of the British. The selfishness of a person who is willing to die, if necessary, fighting for his/her freedom, lies in the fact that he/she is unwilling to go on living in a world where he/she is no longer able to act on his/her own rules and regulations, that is, a world where rudimentary human conditions of existence are no longer possible.

As a displaced community, Tibetans often speak of learning to look to the future without forsaking tradition. And as Tibetans continue their flight from Tibet to India or Nepal and then scatter farther and farther away from the physical land of Tibet, the conversations on identity and culture become more crucial and complex. As the distance increases so does the desperation in keeping Tibet as the eventual home, our aspired home. Yet it is the loss of Tibet and its very distance that also awakens us to view patriotism and identity in new ways that are not guided solely by Buddhist philosophy. Self-assertion- an approach avoided in the past because of the Buddhist aspiration to prevent focus on the self- enters our identity as Tibetans.

When President Obama asked to meet with Steve Jobs, the late Apple boss, his first question was ‘how much would it cost to make the iPhone in the United States, instead of overseas?’ Jobs was characteristically blunt, asserting that ‘those jobs are never coming back’. In point of fact, it’s been estimated that making iPhones exclusively in the US would add around $65 to the cost of each phone – not an unaffordable cost, or an unthinkable drop in margin for Apple, if it meant bringing jobs back home.  But American workers aren’t going to be making iPhones anytime soon, because of the need for speed, and scale, in getting the product on to shelves around the world. When Apple assessed the global demand for the iPhone it estimated that it would need almost 9,000 engineers overseeing the production process to meet demand. Their analysts reported that it would take nine months to recruit that many engineers in the US – in China, it took 15 days. It’s these kind of tales that cause US conservative media outlets to graphically describe Asia as ‘eating the lunch’ off the tables of patriotic, if sleep-walking, American citizens. If Apple had chosen to go to India, instead of China, the costs may have been slightly higher, but the supply of suitably qualified engineers would have been just as plentiful. While China may be the world’s biggest manufacturing plant, India is set to lead the way in the industry that poses the biggest threat to western middle-class parents seeking to put their sons or daughters through college: knowledge.

Section 124-A, under which I am happily charged, is perhaps the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen. Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person or a system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as does not contemplate, promote or incite to violence. But the section under which I am charged is one under which mere promotion of disaffection is a crime. I have studied some of the cases under it, and I know that some of the most loved of India's patriots have been convicted under it. I consider it a privilege, therefore, to be charged under it. ---MK Gandhi, Defence Statement in his trial for sedition, 1922

The Education Department controls the education given, and it is planned on foreign models, and its object is to serve foreign rather than native ends, to make docile Government servants rather than patriotic citizens; high spirits, courage, self-respect, are not encouraged, and docility is regarded as the most precious quality in the student; pride in country, patriotism, ambition, are looked on as dangerous, and English, instead of Indian, Ideals are exalted; the blessings of a foreign rule and the incapacity of Indians to manage their own affairs are constantly inculcated. What wonder that boys thus trained often turn out, as men, time-servers and sycophants, and, finding their legitimate ambitions frustrated, become selfish and care little for the public weal? Their own inferiority has been so driven into them during their most impressionable years, that they do not even feel what Mr. Asquith called the "intolerable degradation of a foreign yoke." India's

ONE OF THE peculiarities of the white race’s presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it. As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be. The continent is said to have been discovered by an Italian who was on his way to India. The earliest explorers were looking for gold, which was, after an early streak of luck in Mexico, always somewhere farther on. Conquests and foundings were incidental to this search—which did not, and could not, end until the continent was finally laid open in an orgy of goldseeking in the middle of the 19th century. Once the unknown of geography was mapped, the industrial marketplace became the new frontier, and we continued, with largely the same motives and with increasing haste and anxiety, to displace ourselves—no longer with unity of direction, like a migrant flock, but like the refugees from a broken ant hill. In our own time we have invaded foreign lands and the moon with the high-toned patriotism of the conquistadors, and with the same mixture of fantasy and avarice.

As Mark Twain once wrote: “[T]he best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes to raising them.

What we see today then is not an emerging India but a re-emerging one. A nation slowly reclaiming its rightful place at the top of the world’s economic pyramid.

The aloo gobi is perhaps to North India what apple pie is to America. It is cheap and easy to make. Like most Indian dishes, you can make aloo gobi in as complex or rudimentary a fashion as you wish. You can eat it with rice, rotis, parathas or even with sliced white bread. A little leftover aloo gobi between two slices of white bread, toasted in one of those clamp sandwich-makers, and served with ketchup and mint chutney, is one of the greatest breakfast achievements of our species.

each year India produces thousands upon thousands of eighteen-year olds who have little to no instructed idea of the last sixty years of Indian history. They have no idea if or how those five-year plans worked. They have no idea if or how the Non-Aligned Movement worked. They have no idea about the numerous wars India has fought against Pakistan or China. They have no idea, for instance, of what many people call the greatest threat to India’s internal security: the Naxal movement. What created this Naxal movement? And why is the movement popular where it is? Our youth doesn’t know.

Whatever their other flaws, deep down most Indian politicians are patriotic.

Indian democracy has taught the world the beauty and competitiveness of its governing system for a prolonged period. But Modi administration is remapping the Indian political map which some called the rise of nationalism, while others called it the rise of patriotism in this era of populism.

While Indian CEOs in Non-Indian companies are getting all the praise and admiration from the Indians, startups born on Indian soil remain unrecognized - this is not a matter of pride, it's a matter of shame, especially for a population whose history is replete with mathematical, scientific and philosophical achievements.

Indeed, one of the principal fears of the American Patriots in the run-up to the war was that Parliament would unleash the East India Company in the Americas to loot there as it had done in India.

But in India, our difficulties being internal, our history has been the history of continual social adjustment and not that of organized power for defence and aggression.

When Operation Flood was sanctioned I knew that it was a massive and extremely complex operation and we would need all the help we could possibly get from all quarters. It was in this connection that, one day, I called on J.R.D. Tata, Chairman of one of India’s largest industrial houses, one known for its commitment to quality and for its patriotism. I met him and explained to him the entire concept behind Operation Flood. I told him that such an enormous task would be extremely difficult to pull off alone and I requested him to spare six managers from the house of Tatas for one year, to help us improve the nation’s dairy industry. I could pay them only public-sector salaries, but within that, I assured him, I would pay them the best that I could. At the end of that year, his managers would return to his company, far richer for their thorough understanding of cooperatives and of agriculture. I was confident that it would be an extremely valuable experience for his managers. J.R.D Tata listened to me very patiently and then told me that since this was not a decision he alone could take I would have to present it to the board. I agreed to do so and met the board and once again explained the intricacies of the entire project to the members. They, too, listened very politely, smiled and nodded. But that is as far as they were prepared to go. To this day, I do not know whose decision it was, but we were loaned not even a single manager from the Tata Group. After all, would it have so adversely impacted the Tatas if they had deputed six managers to the NDDB and that, too, for a brief period of one year? The incident left me with a bitter taste and justified my belief that, in the ultimate analysis, the corporate world and the cooperative world are distinctly different. I

several marquee investors have invested billions of dollars on Indian start-ups which have burnt all the cash without creating any value. Now these investments are expectedly going bad and the investors want to save their money at any cost, including seeking support from the government. Their patriotic story is that they are saving India—and Indian companies, which are actually owned by American, Chinese, Japanese and Russian investors—from American companies. Quite weird.

If you can't go to the borders and fight against the enemy then unite and do something for your country

I am not worried about the immortality of my country Bharat because I know that I am alive and if I die then many more patriots will be born to keep my country immortal forever

We had known the hordes of Moghals and Pathans who invaded India, but we had known them as human races, with their own religions and customs, likes and dislikes,—we had never known them as a nation. We loved and hated them as occasions arose; we fought for them and against them, talked with them in a language which was theirs as well as our own, and guided the destiny of the Empire in which we had our active share. But this time we had to deal, not with kings, not with human races, but with a nation—we, who are no nation ourselves.

Anand was on tour in a distant village when the shattering news of the Chinese invasion was announced. Within hours, there was an astonishing metamorphosis in the prevailing atmosphere. Except for the lone troubled voice that came from the radio, there was a numbed silence all around. Every citizen was in the grip of an indescribable mixture of anger, anguish, a sense of disappointment, and above all, a feeling of unity with every other Indian. Just when Anand was about to leave, a lad of about ten came forward. He put his hand in his shirt pocket and produced a twenty-five paise coin. He held it out tentatively and stammered, "This is my contribution to defeat China..." Anand accepted the coin and hugged the boy. He controlled his emotion with some difficulty. The gesture electrified the atmosphere. For the first time faces brightened somewhat. "Why not raise a fund in the village?", said the Sarpanch. "Yes!" interjected the villagers. "We must give and give and give until it hurts! Each a little more than he can afford to." God! Does this country need the threat of external aggression to unite it internally? wondered Anand, as his car turned into the highway.

A nation is not built by those who hate it. It is built on the shoulders of those who love it.

To me, love for our land is non-negotiable. We have every right to dislike our government, but we cannot live in India and righteously exercise the right to hate our own country.

Diagnosing this alleged antipathy of the Muslims, he elaborated: The Moslems in general and Indian Moslems in particular have not as yet grown out of the historical stage, of intense religiosity and the theological concept of state. Their theology and theocratical [sic] politics divide the human world into two groups only—The Moslem land and the enemy land. All lands which are either entirely inhabited by the Moslems or are ruled over by the Moslems are Moslem lands. All lands, which are mostly inhabited by non-Moslem power are enemy lands and no faithful Moslem is allowed to bear any loyalty to them and is called upon to do everything in his power by policy or force or fraud to convert the non-Moslem there to Moslem faith, to bring about its political conquest by a Moslem power. It is no good quoting sentences here or there from Moslem theological books to prove the contrary. Read the whole book to know its trend. And again it is not with books that we are concerned here but with the followers of the book and how they translate them in practice. You will then see that the whole Moslem history and their daily actions are framed on the design I have outlined above. Consequently, a territorial patriotism is a word unknown to the Moslem—nay is tabooed, unless in connection with a Moslem territory. Afghans can be patriots for Afghanisthan is a Moslem territory today. But an Indian Moslem if he is a real Moslem—and they are intensely religious as a people—cannot faithfully bear loyalty to India as a country, as a nation, as a State, because it is today ‘an Enemy Land’ and doubly lost; for non-Moslems are in a majority here and to boot it is not ruled by any Moslem power, Moslem sovereign. Add to this that of all non-Moslems the Hindus are looked upon as the most damned by Moslem theologians. For Christians and Jews are after all ‘Kitabis’, having the holy books partially in common. But the Hindus are totally ‘Kafirs’ as a consequence their land ‘Hindusthan’ is pre-eminently an ‘enemy’ and as long as it is not ruled by Moslems or all Hindus do not embrace Islam . . . What wonder then that the Muslim League should openly declare its intention to join hands with non-Indian alien Moslem countries rather than with Indian Hindus in forming a Moslem Federation? They could not be accused from their point of view of being traitors to Hindusthan. Their conscience was clear. They never looked upon our today’s ‘Hindusthan’ as their country, nation. It is to them already an alien land, and enemy land—‘a Dar-ul-Harb’ and not a ‘Dar-ul-Islam!!

There is, in fact, in Uncle Tom, as well as in its successor Dred, a whole drama of manners and morals and intellectual points of view which corresponds somewhat to the kind of thing that was then being done by Dickens, and was soon to be continued by Zola, for the relations of the social classes, and which anticipates such later studies of two sharply contrasting peoples uncomfortably involved with one another as the John Bull’s Other Island of Bernard Shaw or E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.

If the youth of the country is Patriot, it is the Sign of Great Nation.

Anybody who criticizes the corporate takeover of Adivasi land is called an antinational “sympathizer” of the banned Maoists. Sympathy is a crime, too. In television studios, guests who try to bring a semblance of intelligence into the debate are shouted down and compelled to demonstrate their loyalty to the nation. This is a war against people who have barely enough to eat one square meal a day. What particular brand of nationalism does this come under? What exactly are we supposed to be proud of? Our lumpen nationalists don’t seem to understand that the more they insist on this hollow sloganeering, the more they force people to say “Bharat Mata ki Jai!” and to declare that “Kashmir is an integral part of India,” the less sure of themselves they sound. The nationalism that is being rammed down our throats is more about hating another country—Pakistan—than loving our own. It’s more about securing territory than loving the land and its people. Paradoxically, those who are branded antinational are the ones who speak about the deaths of rivers and the desecration of forests. They are the ones who worry about the poisoning of the land and the falling of water tables. The “nationalists,” on the other hand, go about speaking of mining, damming, clear-felling, blasting, and selling. In their rule book, hawking minerals to multinational companies is patriotic activity. They have privatized the flag and wrested the microphone.

इस देश पे हम दिलोंजान छिडकते हैं, कोई आँच ना आये इसपे ये खयाल रखते हैं, सरहदों पर नौजवानों को सलाम भेजते हैं, हर एक कुरबाणी का हिसाब भी रखते हैं, दुल्हनसी इस धरती को किसान सजाता हैं, पत्थर के पहाडोसे कोई अंदर नहीं आता हैं, बात देश की होतीं हैं तो हर धर्म पिघल जाता हैं, हर रंगरूप में ये देश एक नयी छवी दिखाता हैं, यहां त्याग का सम्मान सबसे अधिक होता हैं, यहां शहीद को भी एक नया जीवन मिलता हैं, मेरे देश के कई सायें फैले हैं पूरी दुनिया मैं, समेटना चाहता हूं एक दिन इसे इसी भेस में, तकनीकी के इस नये समय में हम इतने आगे बढें, गणतंत्र दिवस के अवसर पर बडी जीत का प्रण लें।

To my countrymen Who gave unto themselves the constitution but not the ability to keep it Who inherited resplendent heritage but not the wisdom to cherish it who suffer and endure in patience without the perception of their potential

To my countrymen Who gave unto themselves the constitution but not the ability to keep Who inherited resplendent heritage but not the wisdom to cherish it who suffer and endure in patience without the perception of their potential

India is my property and I am a property of India

By March 1948 Sheikh Abdullah was the most important man in the Valley. Hari Singh was still the state’s ceremonial head – now called ‘sadr-i-riyasat’ – but he had no real powers. The government of India completely shut him out of the UN deliberations. Their man, as they saw it, was Abdullah. Only he, it was felt, could ‘save’ Kashmir for the Union. At this stage Abdullah himself was inclined to stress the ties between Kashmir and India. In May 1948 he organized a week-long ‘freedom’ celebration in Srinagar, to which he invited the leading lights of the Indian government. The events on the calendar included folk songs and poetry readings, the remembrance of martyrs and visits to refugee camps. The Kashmiri leader commended the ‘patriotic morale of our own people and the gallant fighting forces of the Indian Union’. ‘Our struggle’, said Abdullah, ‘is not merely the affair of the Kashmir people, it is the war of every son and daughter of India.’59 On the first anniversary of Indian independence Abdullah sent a message to the leading Madras weekly, Swatantra. The message sought to unite north and south, mountain and coast, and, above all, Kashmir and India. It deserves to be printed in full: Through the pages of SWATANTRA I wish to send my message of fraternity to the people of the south. Far back in the annals of India the south and north met in the land of Kashmir. The great Shankaracharya came to Kashmir to spread his dynamic philosophy but here he was defeated in argument by a Panditani. This gave rise to the peculiar philosophy of Kashmir – Shaivism. A memorial to the great Shankaracharya in Kashmir stands prominent on the top of the Shankaracharya Hill in Srinagar. It is a temple containing the Murti of Shiva. More recently it was given to a southerner to take the case of Kashmir to the United Nations and, as the whole of India knows, with the doggedness and tenacity that is so usual to the southerner, he defended Kashmir. We in Kashmir expect that we shall continue to receive support and sympathy from the people of the south and that some day when we describe the extent of our country we shall use the phrase ‘from Kashmir to Cape Comorin’.60

If I would be the Prime Minister of India, no one would die of hunger, poverty, rape and the lake of humanity

It’s amazing that we still celebrate freedom without real freedom

The future of my country depends on the youth of my country and when they become educated India will become a super power

The youth of my country are completely distracted, but still I love my India

There is no strong law against rapists, but still I love my India

190 million people in India go hungry daily, but still i love my India

Two-thirds of people in India live in poverty, but still i love my India

33,356 rape cases were reported across India in 2018, but still i love my India

29,017 cases of murder were registered during 2018, showing an increase of 1.3 per cent over 2017, but still I love my India

If you really love your country, show it by actions, not only words

There is a real Bharatvarsha—a complete India. Unless we establish ourselves there, we can’t absorb its true living essence into our minds and hearts. Therefore I say, forgetting all else, discarding book-learning, the lure of prestige, and the temptation of odd profits, we must set sail for that very port, whether we drown or perish. No wonder I can never forget the true, complete image of Bharatvarsha.

The victory over Pakistan unleashed a huge wave of patriotic sentiment. It was hailed as ‘India’s first military victory in centuries’,53 speaking in terms not of India the nation, but of India the land mass and demographic entity. In the first half of the second millennium a succession of foreign armies had come in through the north-west passage to plunder and conquer. Later rulers were Christian rather than Muslim, and came by sea rather than overland. Most recently, there had been that crushing defeat at the hands of the Chinese. For so long used to humiliation and defeat, Indians could at last savour the sweet smell of military success.

The blood of many a brave Tamilian, Andhra, Malayalee and Coorgi’, it said, ‘has soaked into the fertile soil of Kashmir and mixed with the blood of the Kashmiri patriots, cementing for ever the unity of the North and the South.

The Madras journal, for its part, responded by printing a lyrical paean to the union of Kashmir with India. ‘The blood of many a brave Tamilian, Andhra, Malayalee and Coorgi’, it said, ‘has soaked into the fertile soil of Kashmir and mixed with the blood of the Kashmiri patriots, cementing for ever the unity of the North and the South.

It remains one of the saddest memories of my life—the memory of how, intimidated by decades of harassment and violence at the hands of Hindutva bigots, so many of my fellow citizens had to shame themselves into a public display of patriotism

According to every patriotic Indian, India was a victim of unprovoked Chinese aggression, and China is in illegal occupation of vast tracts of Indian territory. Although the Hurriyat and its friends in Pakistan do not care for the feelings of India’s citizens, the Hurriyat claims to stand for Kashmiris. How then can it ignore the fact that 42,000 sq miles of Jammu & Kashmir territory have been ceded to the Chinese by the Government of Pakistan? The Hurriyat has never protested against this Pakistani action, nor shown the slightest concern for the Kashmiri inhabitants of the ceded territory. They are China’s slaves, with neither azadi nor jamhooriyat, nor with any guaranteed human rights enjoyed by citizens. The Hurriyat is supremely indifferent to their fate, which is an inconvenience for those playing mercenary politics and depending on Pakistan for a livelihood.

Manmohan Singh’s lost opportunity The anti-corruption agitations of 2011 provided a wonderful opportunity for the prime minister and his government to start the process of purging the system of corruption and retrieving black money illegally stashed away in foreign banks. The government had two options to get our money back. The first, to behave like a responsible, honourable and strong nation and demonstrate political will to fight corruption using the ample machinery available through international and bilateral legal instruments, the Tax Information Exchange Treaties (TIEAs), Double Taxation Avoidance Agreements (DTAAs) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) automatic exchange route. The Swiss have volunteered cooperation; and India can follow the example of the US and UK, and get India’s stolen money back to the country. Or, the government can take the other option and behave like a banana republic and a failed state, plunder capital from their own country through a UPA-sponsored version of imperialism, perpetuate poverty and backwardness by denying the people of this country their rightful development dividend while repeatedly rewarding and incentivizing the looters with amnesty schemes. Mr Singh’s government has continuously concealed information on black money by fooling the people of our country, shielding the corrupt and guilty who have illegal bank accounts in foreign banks, and by creating obstacles for any progress in the matter instead of taking proactive measures to obtain the information from the foreign governments concerned. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could have chosen the former option and gone down in history as a great patriot and leader of our country, a pioneer against corruption. But sadly, he has lost the opportunity and chosen such, that history will remember him as having presided over the greatest frauds practised on this poor and gullible nation.

A nation’s geography and history are determined by its capability to protect and promote its citizen and not by its constitution, law, armed forces and moralistic and patriotic jargon. Has post-independence India lived up to that universal truth of nationhood?

With the decline of the United States as the world’s leader, I find it important to look around our globe for intelligent people who have the depth of understanding that could perhaps chart a way to the future. One such person is Bernard-Henri Lévy a French philosopher who was born in Béni Saf, French Algeria on November 5, 1948. . The Boston Globe has said that he is "perhaps the most prominent intellectual in France today." Although his published work and political activism has fueled controversies, he invokes thought provoking insight into today’s controversial world and national views. As a young man and Zionist he was a war correspondent for “Combat” newspaper for the French Underground. Following the war Bernard attended Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and in 1968; he graduated with a degree in philosophy from the famous École Normale Supérieure. This was followed by him traveling to India where he joined the International Brigade to aid Bangladeshi freedom fighters. Returning to Paris, Bernard founded the ‘New Philosophers School.’ At that time he wrote books bringing to light the dark side of French history. Although some of his books were criticized for their journalistic character and unbalanced approach to French history, but most respected French academics took a serious look at his position that Marxism was inherently corrupt. Some of his musings include the predicament of the Kurds and the Shame of Aleppo, referring to the plight of the children in Aleppo during the bloody Syrian civil war. Not everyone agrees with Bernard, as pointed out by an article “Why Does Everyone Hate Bernard-Henri Lévy?” However he is credited with nearly single handedly toppling Muammar Gaddafi. His reward was that in 2008 he was targeted for assassination by a Belgium-based Islamist militant group. Looking like a rock star and ladies man, with his signature dark suits and unbuttoned white shirt, he said that “democracies are not run by the truth,” and notes that the American president is not the author of the anti-intellectual movement it, but rather its product. He added that the anti-intellectualism movement that has swept the United States and Europe in the last 12 months has been a long time coming. The responsibility to support verified information and not publicize fake news as equal has been ignored. He said that the president may be the heart of the anti-intellectual movement, but social media is the mechanism! Not everyone agrees with Bernard; however his views require our attention. If we are to preserve our democracy we have to look at the big picture and let go of some of our partisan thinking. We can still save our democracy, but only if we become patriots instead of partisans!

Pakistani officers consider the most regressive clerics patriotic because, after all, they would never make common cause with Pakistan’s external enemies—the Indians and whoever else Pakistani intelligence might know or imagine as conspiring against the country at any given moment. Liberal and secular thinkers, on the other hand, are permanently suspect. If they speak up for any ethnic group, they must want Pakistan’s disintegration; if they ask for a secular state, they could be asking for eliminating Pakistan’s identity and a virtual reincorporation into India; and if they question the army’s political role or its budget, they must be in league with ‘the enemy’.

State-run broadcast TV had been around for decades, but poor reception and a dearth of programming meant there simply wasn’t much reason to watch. But lately, thanks to a steep fall in the price of equipment and distribution, great swaths of India have been wired for cable and satellite TV. Between 2001 and 2006, some 150 million Indians received cable for the first time, their villages suddenly crackling with the latest game shows and soap operas, newscasts and police procedurals, beamed from the big cities of India and abroad. TV gave many Indian villagers their first good look at the outside world.

Rural Indian families who got cable TV began to have a lower birthrate than families without TV. (In a country like India, a lower birthrate generally means more autonomy for women and fewer health risks.)