Launching the 150th anniversary commemoration of Vande Mataram, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had spoken of the ode as the anthem of freedom, which also inspires us on how to protect that freedom. As India, the “Bharata Shakti” of Sri Aurobindo’s dream, completes the 79th year of her independence, the realisation that freedom needs to be protected must occupy and exercise our minds and thoughts.

 In his last public message, in December 1948, Sri Aurobindo had also cautioned against India “forfeiting” her “Swadharma” and losing her soul. He spoke of the danger of ancient India’s spirit disappearing and of India emerging as just another nation. “Then ancient India and her spirit might disappear altogether and we would have only one more nation like the others and that would be a real gain neither to the world nor to us.”

 The disappearance of Bharat’s essence, its dissolution and change beyond recognition, seemed to Sri Aurobindo to be one of the principal challenges to India’s freedom. “It would be a tragic irony of fate,” he wrote, “if India were to throw away her spiritual heritage at the very moment when in the rest of the world there is more and more a turning towards her for spiritual help and a saving Light.” The “woke” attitude and approach, which believes in defiling and deconstructing the sense and essence of a value- and norm-based society, is antithetical to the spirit of ancient India that Sri Aurobindo speaks of. The “woke” is emerging as a threat to India’s freedom.

 It is intolerant of scientific truth and of patriotism. It believes that cultural and social values, traditions and the family system, a civilisation’s sacred texts, knowledge systems, national symbols and faith need to be defiled and despoiled. The “woke” advocates a deconstructionist revolution. It speaks of creating a country and society devoid of sacredness, faith, duty, solidarity, sacrifice and dreams.

 The “woke” attitude has no need of these, and that is why it is vehement in its opposition to Vande Mataram. Any song or anthem that evokes love and reverence for the Motherland through an emotive contemplation of her various forms and aspirations is anathema to the “woke.”

 For them, an anthem qualifies only when it incites violence, destruction and clash. Freedom for the “woke” is not sacred; it is not necessary. In its spree of deconstruction, the “woke” will not hesitate to barter freedom. The “woke” has internalised a non-Indian cultural and political ideology and framework. The “woke’s” agenda is to force that ideology into Indian structures and conditions. It does not, therefore, see India’s political, economic, cultural and intellectual freedom as sacrosanct. The “woke” opposes India’s quest for “Swaraj in Ideas.” It opposes all those who, in the past and the present, speak up for the need to recover this swaraj in our thinking and expressions. The “woke” opposes Rishi Bankim, it negates Sri Aurobindo, is intolerant of Vivekananda, is selective of Ambedkar and has no time for the revolutionary nationalists who struggled to free India. The “woke” opposes Modi when he speaks of “Panch Pran”, the “Five Pledges” — of the need for taking pride in our rich heritage and legacy, of erasing all traces of servitude, of forsaking the colonial mindset and of fulfilling duties and responsibilities.

 Since the “woke” believes in fragmenting the nation, in erasing civilisational identities and foundations, its advocates oppose all those who speak otherwise. For them, the belief in India’s rise is an illusion. India, for them, is non-existent; it is an imagination, a shallow poetic emotion, a construct with no real sense and existence. They treat as a lunatic anyone who has gone to the gallows with the hope of freeing India. They will cry hoarse against Sri Aurobindo when he says that India “is not a piece of earth, nor a figure of speech, nor a fiction of the mind”; she is a “Shakti”, “Bhawani Bharati”, a “living unity of the Shaktis” of the crore of people who make up the nation. In his last address to the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949, Babasaheb Ambedkar was concerned with India’s independence. “Will she maintain her independence, or will she lose it again?” 

Babasaheb made a thought-provoking point. “It is not that India was never an independent country. The point is that she once lost the independence she had. Will she lose it a second time? What perturbs me greatly is the fact that not only India has once before lost her independence, but she lost it by the infidelity and treachery of some of her own people…” The advocates of the “woke” mentality and ideology are the treacherous infidels today. It is only the spirit of “Bharata Bhagya Vidhata” that can counter them. That spirit needs to be ceaselessly invoked and propitiated for freedom to be preserved and protected.