UNITY BY DIVERSITY

I remember in school I was taught, ‘Bharat ki akhandata main uski shakti hai’, means India’s power is in its diversity. That time my intellect was not so alert to question this statement. It is hard to argue against something which is fed in your mind in childhood. Still we should make an attempt.

Let us first raise basic question. What is unity? If you think that everyone having same opinion, everyone wanting same thing and everyone having same perspective is unity, then India lacks unity. But this is too narrow view of unity. I would define unity as a feeling, a sense of brotherhood. Unity is not free of arguments and confrontations.

Having different opinions, arguments, efforts for cause one does believe in, are part of democracy and diversity. If one opposes us it does not mean that he hate us, it can be just that he has his own reasoning and belief. The unity comes after all arguments happen and decision is taken. Unity is something which binds people in spite of all this. For example unity comes when first we argue about caste based reservation. But once it is implicated we sent our children to same school and invite at our home their friends from other caste.

The beauty of unity is that it comes out openly at the time of adversity, may be that it why it is seen less and questioned many times. But the time of wars or time of natural disasters have shown again and again how people have stand by each other forgetting all their differences.

Some people due to diversity do treat others differently. And this behavior can go to extremes of being a threat to diversity. For this reason we should not consider diversity as threat. Human beings are capable of using same energy for both constructive and destructive purpose. Like nuclear energy, power of diversity can be used both ways.

If due to our inefficiency in administration we let diversity be one of the reason for unfair distribution of resources and treatment of human beings then indeed we will make diversity hamper our progress. In fact till now unity is the thing which has made us move forward with so much of diversity. If we would use our diversity to complement each other shortcoming, like moving surplus food from one area to deficit area, then it will make unity strong. If we use diversity as excuse of our inefficiency then it will destroy our unity.