India is great but not as great...

India is great enough to have birthed some of the greatest humans, the sharpest thinkers, and the bravest revolutionaries—Ambedkar, Gandhi, JP, Bhagat Singh, Kalam, and many more whose names history has not been able to erase and even more whose names history has not been able to write.

India is great enough to send missions to the moon, but not great enough to ensure that its own people don’t starve to death under those very skies (countless farmers). It is great enough to boast of being the world’s largest democracy, but not great enough to prevent the assassination of a journalist who dared to speak truth to power (Gauri Lankesh). It is great enough to claim secularism, but not great enough to protect a man from being lynched for the food on his plate (Md. Akhlaq).

India is great enough to procreate great people but not great enough to respect them. Nambi Narayanan, a scientist who could have taken the nation’s space program to greater heights, was accused of treason, tortured, humiliated, and abandoned by the very nation he wanted to serve. Homi Bhabha’s mysterious death remains a footnote, lost in a history that refuses to ask uncomfortable questions. Gauri Lankesh, a journalist, was shot at her doorstep for daring to question the powerful.

India is great enough to worship goddesses, but not great enough to protect its women. We hail Durga, Kali, and Lakshmi, but let our daughters be raped, murdered, and discarded like garbage. Nirbhaya’s story shook the world, her pain so unimaginable that it forced a nation to look at itself in shame. But she was not the first, nor the last. The Unnao case, where a rape survivor had to fight not just her rapists but an entire system determined to silence her, tells us of the greatness of the nation. Hathras, where a Dalit woman was gang-raped, murdered, and burned in the dead of night by the very police meant to protect her, is proof that even in death, dignity is denied to the oppressed. And then there’s the RG Kar Medical College case, where a lady doctor was gang-raped inside a hospital. Her trauma was reduced to a statistic in a nation where even the walls of an institution meant for care cannot protect a woman from brutality. Every time a woman is raped, tortured, and discarded, India does not just fail her—it betrays her. India fails itself.

India is great enough to call itself the land of justice, but not great enough to deliver it. Dalits still get killed for riding a horse. Muslims get dragged from their homes and beaten for existing. A man like Rohith Vemula, who dared to dream beyond what his caste allowed, was pushed to a point where death seemed easier than life.

India is great enough to have its Constitution drafted by a man who envisioned equality, but not great enough to let that equality see the light of day. Manual scavengers still die in the sewers they are forced to clean. Farmers still die on the roads they were forced to protest on. Students still sit behind separate plates, their caste determining what they deserve.

India is great enough to celebrate its independence, but not great enough to admit that some people never got free. The ghosts of the Emergency still linger. Forced sterilizations robbed thousands of their dignity, their bodies treated as political experiments. Slum-dwellers were uprooted overnight, their homes bulldozed in the name of beautification. Dissenters were thrown into jails, their voices smothered under the weight of a dictator’s decree. Justice was a privilege only the powerful could afford.

The Kashmiris still live under lockdowns. Protesters still get silenced with sedition charges. Families still wait for their disappeared sons, and mothers still wail outside prisons where their children rot without trials. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

India is great, but not great enough.

"Jinhe naaz hai Hind par, woh kahaan hai? Kahaan hai, kahaan hai, kahaan hai?"

Sahir Ludhianvi's words, written as a cry of anguish to Nehru, still ring true today. The questions remain unanswered, the betrayals unaddressed, the injustices unpunished. The cries of the betrayed, the forgotten, and the oppressed still wait for justice, for reckoning, for light to break through the darkness.

Still, it’s my motherland.

And for that, I am both lucky and duty bound—to love it, to fight for it, and to dream that one day, it will be as great as it claims to be.

Enclosed is a letter demanding that the President of India bestow the Bharat Ratna upon someone who was denied their due—not by fate, but by the deliberate apathy and injustice of this nation.