Page 22 - Swatantrata to Atmanirbharta : Lokmanya Tilak’s legacy

To say that the socio-political landscape of our country is
beset with some fault-lines, will be the understatement of the
year. They are becoming apparent along every conceivable
divide, political, social, economic, religious, geographical,
and so on. Finding a common ground on any of the problems
facing our country, is becoming progressively difficult. Even the
immediate and lethal danger of Covid-19 is not able to garner a
united response, with all the shoulders to the wheel. When else
can there be a greater need for a fatherly figure, like Lokmanya
Tilak, who was scholarly but with a good rapport with the
masses, deeply religious but not obscurantist, proponent of
SWADESHI, but not isolationist, astute politician with a very
strong social conscience and a fearless writer without a vitriolic
pen?

Exactly 63 years back, when in the eighth standard, the
author had written an essay on Lokmanya Tilak in which he
had narrated the following incidence of Tilak’s life, which was
known to schoolchildren of that era. Once Lokmanya’s teacher
found peanut shells on the class-room floor. When nobody came
forward to accept the misdemeanor, the teacher threatened to
punish all the students. Tilak refused to receive it. When asked
to name the culprit instead, he declined to do so either, saying
that he does not believe in back-biting.

Today, more than half a century later, the author is painfully
aware of his limited capacity in describing, in this essay, the full
spectrum of the personality of this great son of Mother India.

Swatantrata to Atmanirbharata 20