The nation must be thankful to Prime Minister Narender Modi and Amit Shah, more so to the RSS/BJP for giving this nation young leaders of future. Disha Ravi is definitely the hope and future of India. Leaders emerge only when the nation is in a crisis. Particularly very young leaders emerge when it is charged with emotion for freedom or equality and human dignity. When Kanaiya Kumar and others in Jawaharlal Nehru University, who were more grown up student leaders, gave the slogan Azadi I was not comfortable.
The struggle of Indian people, the Shudra farmers, Dalits and Adivasis is not for freedom but for equality and dignity. Freedom is achieved with Ambedkar’s constitution but not equality and dignity in every field of life. In modern India the RSS and its ideology has not shown indication that they are against varna dharma and inequality. The farmers who are mostly Shudra artisans are unequal and undignified in the varna system.The Shudras,Dalits and Adivasis will suffer more and more in this kind of a rule.
They did not stop with abrogation of 370 and CAA but moved on to enact the Farm Laws that would hand over the entire agribusiness to the Bania monopoly capitalists. The agribusiness which was in the hands of the Shudra agrarian castes and because of that economy there are a number of regional parties that are ruling the states checkmating the control of RSS/BJP. They enacted the farm laws to set the Shudra leadership across India almost to the pre-Independence status. Fortunately they understood that.
When the Modi Government arrested a young girl of 22 years, Dish Ravi for her support to farmers’ protest, I thought she would become a globally identifiable young leader like Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai. Her ability to invite the attention of the global community to the plight of the food producers has shaken the rulers. The present ruling political forces that decided to hand over the labour power of farming families to the monopoly houses which never respected the farming community. That surprised the whole world. Unlike the race question the caste/class nature of the Indian food producers is not known to the world. Disha Ravi’s activism for environment protection like Greta seems to have realized that without good agriculture there would not be good greenery and without good greenery, there would not be a good environment in India and the world.
This young girl activist comes from Lingayat Shudra peasant family. She lives in Bengaluru with her mother as a single parent. Her grandparents are farmers in Tumkur district, Karnataka. For editing two sentences in an internet toolkit she was arrested, leaving her single mother behind and charged with sedition. This very same Government provides expensive security for Kangana Ranaut, a Ksatriya actor, who is abusing the food producers of India as terrorists. She is behaving like a queen on the Indian national scene.
There is a very good proverb in Telugu: chetilo daalu and ballem, vantipai kavacham, unte yuddam chyyadam kastama (when there is war robe on the body and knife and shield in the hands fighting in war field is not difficult) Kangana is fighting with all those weapons in the hands only on screen. In real life with the support of the central Government fighting poor food producers.
Disha is the real heroine of the nation fighting a massive battle with just a pen in hands–the battle for dignity of food producers. She is not acting but fighting on the street, in the courts. That gives a life to this nation.
Disha is an environmental activist as part of global young female environmental activists. The world environment is closely linked to agriculture. As Donald Trump disliked Greta Thunberg ,the European environmentalist Modi and Mohan Bhagwat seem to dislike Disha. But the entire farmers world does keep her in their hearts. She is a beloved daughter of this dharti.
What do her college mates from Benguluru say about her. She was organizing an environmental campaign through a network called Fridays For Future (FFF).
“Her sense of history is remarkable as she has drawn not only from her personal, familial history of farmer-grandparents and the difficulties they suffered due to the impact of climate change on agricultural practices. She has also drawn her inspiration to protest and lend her voice to farmers’ protests in the country from the greatest of people’s movements in India – the Independence struggle”.
What she said in the Delhi court has lit a lamp in the hearts of millions of young women and men of not only this country but of the whole world. She said “If highlighting farmers’ protest globally is sedition, I am better [off] in jail.” This only reminds us what 23 year old Bhagt Sing said in the jail and colonial court. This one statement of a young woman from a farmer’s family who were not supposed to read and write till Savitribai Phule and Mahatma Phule began a socio-spiritual and cultural revolution of ‘read and write and fight’ in the mid nineteenth century. She has proved what is the power of language that could communicate to the global mass.
She was arrested because there is a leader in her. If only the Delhi Police were not to arrest her the nation and the world would not have known this great girl, who is working for the welfare of not just India but the whole world.
Malala won the Nobel Prize, even though Pakistan did not like her. But see what Indian so called nationalist Government did? It shamed the whole nation by its conduct.
Disha I salute you. Your grandparents and your mother would be proud of you, as the nation is.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is simply an admirer of Disha Ravi
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