Citizenship Awareness is the missing catalyst in National development

Our country is silently longing for this revolutionary human change. Our people have the intelligence, the talents, the resources, to make their country great in every respect. It needs only that intangible something to trigger and ignite all these into the pure flame of nation-wide human development. Put the fire at the bottom, and let it burn upwards into an Indian nation, said Swami Vivekananda. That triggering something which will effect this miracle is the wide diffusion of enlightened citizenship-awareness in the country. And the nation's education is the heart and artery system for this diffusion. Nothing else can help to achieve it. No political slogans or administrative tricks, or the self-cancelling structural changes fitfully introduced into our education these thirty years, can achieve this miracle. Continued reliance on them will only deepen and prolong the agony of the nation and sharpen its internal tensions and conflicts. They will keep our ailing democracy ailing all the time, like a weak child born with various infantile ailments. If we want to see our infant democracy gain its health and, growing from robust childhood to healthy adulthood, give the blessings of its millennia-old and ever-fresh and luminous visions and experiences to its own people and to the rest of humanity, we have to take immediate energetic steps to treat the maladies afflicting our nation, curatively and preventively. If we have the maladies, let us also realize that we have the remedies also with us. Our philosophy of human growth and development and fulfilment, as given in our Vedanta, can stand rational critical scrutiny in any country in the world. It is a philosophy that invites and welcomes such a critical handling by the keen minds of our country.

EXTRACTS FROM: Eternal Values for a Changing Society Volume IV - Democracy for Total Human Fulfilment; 1 - Enlightened citizenship and our democracy (Pg:41-42; ed. 1993)
This was the inaugural address at the Symposium on Enlightened Citizenship organized by the Ramakrishna Mission, New Delhi - held on April 27, 1980.