My Opinion: ‘Ghar Wapsi’: “What an idea Sirji”

Here are half a dozen ideas for Ghar Wapsi Programs:

1. Ghar Wapsi of all the Multi-National Corporations, mining companies, retails chains and all other global concerns. Let them go to their native countries and towns and set up their outlets, call centres, mines and what not.
2. Ghar Wapsi of all mobile company users to landlines and to our very own BSNL. So no more mobile phones, never smart phones, only landlines!
3. And maybe even all Reebok, Nike and other companies should be shunned and we should all have Ghar Wapsi to dear old BATA (mind you it is also a foreign MNC!) or the good old handmade leather chappals?
4. Ghar Wapsi from Burgers to Vada Paav. No more Subway and KFC and Burger King, Chinese restaurants and the likes. Only Indian food!
5. Ghar Wapsi to old modes of animal based transport; no more mechanised vehicles like buses, trains, flights.
6. Ghap Wapsi of modern medicine -lets exclusively revert back to age-old healing systems including traditional healers and ayurvedic practices where surgeries are said to have happened without anaesthesia.

You may say this is ridiculous. But if it is ridiculous in the area of industry, health and economics then it is equally so in religion. If it is acceptable in religion then it should be equally acceptable in all other areas too.

If the proponents of Ghar Wapsi could tell us what is the historic date to which we return- is it 2000 years back? If so then we may have to go back to no mechanisation, no electricity, only kingdoms and clans fighting among themselves and so on. If we are to do Ghar Wapsi why only for religion? Let us do it for all areas of society- transport, communication, industry, governance, food and politics.

Right to Choose is the Right to liberty and life
At an individual level when we take away the right to choose and say a person cannot choose what they believe in or practise then it threatens the basic rights of freedom and liberty. He or she may have made the choice for whatever reason- spiritual, material, social- but it is their right.

Tomorrow if I say that a private mobile company is stealing BSNL customers by advertising, giving gifts and special offers and therefore, it is manipulative or coercive or subversive or wrong; If I say that a few decades back these companies did not exist in India therefore they are foreign and unacceptable you would laugh at me. You would say it is the individual’s choice whether to fall for the advertising and marketing gimmicks and maybe that person does find their service and schemes better. Who am I to police them? Just because my parents’ generation only bought Prestige or BATA or BSNL or VICCO I am under no obligation to do the same. 

The same applies to faith or religion or beliefs. Just because our ancestors followed or believed something it does not in any way obligate us to do the same. If individuals or communities have changed their beliefs for material gain, social liberation or spiritual gains, it is their choice to change or remain in that today.

Having a systematic program to cleanse them and bring them back is taking away the liberty of choice, and somehow believing that those people cannot think and act for themselves and therefore, the ‘morally superior’ will step in and decide for them. This is a dangerous trend of devaluing people and communities.

We all have friends who are practising Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. We also have friends who do not believe in god or religion. Each has journeyed according to their experience and convictions. For some it is what their families had been doing, for some it is deviating from the ‘normal’. But that is the beauty of a freedom and democracy is it not?

Ghar Wapsi that should be championed
Nonetheless, there are Ghar Wapsi ideas we could champion:

• The Ghar Wapsi of all the indigenous peoples who have been displaced by successive governments in the name of mining, dams, forest conservation and what not. Give them back there lands, homes, livelihoods and communities.
• Ghar Wapsi to a sustainable way of life of living that is in harmony with nature. Farmers given opportunity to use organic ways of cultivation rather than cash crops and genetically modified seeds which are harmful to the soil and increase dependence on chemical pesticides and expensive seeds.
• Ghar Wapsi from the consumerist lifestyle that destroys our environment and future to a sustainable contented lifestyle that leaves fewer carbon foot prints.
• Ghar Wapsi to family and community living where we have time for each other and are not caught up in the rat race of life and connected globally yet disconnected with our families.
• Ghar Wapsi to a more tolerant and inclusive way of living- if and whenever that existed- where religions/faiths were not ways of dividing and ruling over people.

In Summary, let us have Ghar Wapsi from injustice to justice, from violence to peace and from oppression to freedom.

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free Where the world has not been broken up into fragments By narrow domestic walls Where words come out from the depth of truth Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit Where the mind is led forward by thee Into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake” Tagore

Happy Homecoming this New Year to such a life!