What Sister Nivedita understood about India that we have forgotten

By Harasankar Adhikari 

In the idea of a “Vikshit Bharat,” many real problems—hunger, poverty, ill health, unemployment, and joblessness—are increasingly overshadowed by the religious contest between Hindu and Muslim fundamentalisms. This contest is often sponsored and patronised by political parties across the spectrum, whether openly Hindutva-oriented, Islamist, partisan, or self-proclaimed secular.

Poverty is masked by a manufactured statistical narrative that rarely reflects lived reality; public health is claimed to be adequately addressed through schemes such as Ayushman Bharat; and education—the backbone of a nation’s long-term progress—has ceased to receive the seriousness it deserves. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 is projected as if it has addressed all needs and necessities, even as the growing dominance of informal labour markets and dependence on precarious employment create mental and economic barriers to accessing higher education.

Meanwhile, religion-based electoral politics has revitalised the present political arena. India’s celebrated unity in diversity stands under strain as almost all political parties engage, directly or indirectly, in religious polarisation to consolidate captive vote banks. Power and authority have come to overshadow questions of justice, welfare, and collective well-being, shaping the country’s fate and fortune more decisively than social harmony or inclusive development.

In this context, one is compelled to ask: was Sister Nivedita’s hope and prediction naïve or unfair?

She wrote:

"The mother’s heart, the hero’s will,

The sweetness of the southern breeze,

The sacred charm and strength that dwell

On Aryan altars, flaming, free;

All these be yours, and many more

No ancient soul could dream before—

Be thou to India’s future son

The mistress, servant, friend in one."

Elsewhere, she reflected on civic life in words that remain strikingly relevant today:

“The civic life…is that which pertains to the community as a whole, that community—whether of nation, province, or township—whose unity transcends and ignores that of the family…. The civic spirit embodies the personal and categorical form of such ideals as those of national unity…. Its creative bond is that of place, the common home—as distinguished from blood, the common kin—that common home, whose children are knit together to make the civitas, the civic family, rising in its largest complexity to be the national family.”

Nivedita hoped that “India must be observed by this great conception. Hindu and Mohammedan must become one in it with a passionate admiration of each other.” In a letter dated 14 April 1903, she wrote with quiet conviction:

“If the whole India could agree to give, say, ten minutes every evening, at the oncoming darkness, to thinking a single thought—We are one. We are one. Nothing can prevail against us to make us think we are divided. For we are one and all; the antagonisms amongst us are illusions—the power that would be generated can hardly be measured.”

What Sister Nivedita—a foreign-born patriot and spiritual stalwart—envisioned more than a century ago appears increasingly distant today. After 78 years of independence, her call for civic unity beyond religious and communal divisions remains largely unheeded by our political leadership.