On Resurgent India Movement

The Movement that we call Resurgent India links itself to the Movement that commenced a hundred years ago in Calcutta and in the east, through the electrifying pages of Bande Mataram penned by Sri Aurobindo. Within two years, the uncompromising demand for complete freedom rent the skies of India. Freedom has come, but we need at this stage once again to instil in our country a new and uncompromising demand for Resurgence of India. We need to discover at the deepest depths that great eternal India and create new forms of expression and revitalize the old ones – nothing short of a Rebirth or a Renaissance of India more radical than the Renaissance that shaped the modern western world.

It is propitious for us today that at this juncture we have in our beloved Rashtrapatiji a leader of vision and action who has breathed in the country that new pulsation and force that can match the needs of Resurgent India. To that leadership we salute today on this occasion with profound gratitude and from that leadership, we derive an abiding inspiration.

Our Movement of Resurgent India is, first of all, a Vision and secondly it is a Call. Our vision underlines the need for a new synthesis which can lift us from the dawns of the past and usher into what Sri Aurobindo calls “the Noons of the future”. This synthesis will be fourfold: synthesis of the East and the West, commencing from the East and culminating into world-unity that respects and nourishes living pulsation of diversity.

Secondly, synthesis of material prosperity that can be ours with advancement of knowledge that weld together Science, Technology, Philosophy and Culture. Thirdly, a synthesis of spiritualised life that negates exclusivism from ideologies and isms, systems and religions. And fourthly, a synthesis a synthesis of the repositories of wisdom that are still to be pooled together from the past books of knowledge and the ever-progressive vistas of astonishing revelations that seem to be awaiting us from the present evolutionary movement which is refashioning humanity for its transmutation into super-humanity.

To achieve these, our call is first to the youth, ‒ the youth that has before them great Masters like the leonine Swami Vivekananda as their ideal image, ‒ one who had the strength and courage to ask the great question: Have you seen God? He saw and realised God and wanted the youth to realise God. He also wanted the manifestation of God in the upliftment of all by transcending all the fetters of

dogmas and conflicting claims of doctrines and disputes. It is to that call that we invite the youth of today to respond.

Our call is next to the elite and to the rich and to the capable leaders. We want them to remember the wise counsel that their eminence, their riches and their leadership are sustained by a force that comes from below and that their own good lies in transmitting to all their knowledge, their skill and their good fortune as rapidly as possible. For, it is in that transmission that lies the secret of painless transition from the past to the future.

Our call, thirdly, is to the holders of Power. It is in their hands to implement the necessary reforms in our Constitution and create a true democratic democracy. It is in their hands to change the present system of education, that stifles the soul of the child, and to give to the nation the fruits of the pioneering experiments carried out in India and elsewhere. We urge upon them to create a permanent body of the wise and the learned who have studied the educational experiments of Tagore and Gandhi, of Maharshi Dayananda and Swami Vivekananda, and of Sri Aurobindo, of Rousseau and Pestalozzi, of Montessori, Russell and Paulo Friere, and who can therefore constantly innovate education and confer sovereignty of the nation. It is in their hands to create establishments that can constantly empower the weak and the poor and which can foster the ideal and practice of Sarvodaya, the rise and fulfilment of all. It is in their hands to energise the country, the first premise of which is abundant supply of electricity. It is said of Lenin that his foresight in developing the Soviet Union gave the highest priority to the vital policy of making electricity available to all and to all places. He gave that electrifying slogan ‘soviet plus electricity is equal to communism’. We need that kind of priority and that sense of urgency in our country today. It is in their hands to create right bonds with neighbouring and distant countries to provide mutual security and protection and foster the ‘rule of law’. All these are today in a state of great decline.

Our call, fourthly, is to all our sisters and brothers, and to ourselves to learn and to teach, to work and to cooperate, to do and to be, to scale heights of excellence and even to aspire for perfection. Did not Jesus Christ give us the message, “Be thou as perfect as God in heaven is perfect”. Let us, in all our thoughts and deeds, in our aspirations and prayers, strive to be and to exceed continuously our own borders of limitations.

This is the perspective against which this Conference is being held. And the theme tells us, ‘Look East’! We are immensely grateful to our Beloved Rashtrapatiji for being with us, and we look forward to his inspiring guidance.