WHITHER INDIA?
Part – 1
Dr. Yerneni
VenkateswaraRao
Retired
Principal
Gudivada-A.P
Independent India, the fruit of years of struggle , toil and
turmoil, blood sweat and sacrifice of countless men and women was soon
transformed into a nation of dependent people-dependent on the government for
the satisfaction of even the most elementary human needs to an extent that it
drained them of the last drop of initiative and self-dependence on their part
thereby rendering them abject cripples with no trace of self-respect; political
slavery has come to be replaced with a far more pernicious form of slavery viz
mental slavery.
Who
else but our leaders should get (dis credit for this sorry state of affairs?
The
earlier crop of stalwart leaders like Nehru in spite of their idealism and
humanism and all good intentions started stressing too much on the rights and
privileges of the people without ever bothering to highlight the duties and
responsibilities that go with them.
The
schism between rights and responsibilities and privileges and obligations could
not wreck as much havoc as it could have on the society because of the strong
foundation of age old values and time-tested traditions on which the edifice of
Indian society has been erected and which has more or less remained intact .
However people began looking for more and more instead of less and less
government which should not have been the case in any mature democratic polity.
Although
it is true that the rigid administrative structure , the steel frame of
imperial rule, set up with its control-oriented status quo ist mind-set not
only refused to transform itself into a growth-oriented agency committed to
catalysing the country’s all round development in partnership with local
self-governing bodies but actually further consolidated the old command pattern
of governance by centralizing all decision-making powers in the hands of the bureaucracy
thereby dealing a body blow to the inchoate democratic culture and ethos/
fledgling democratic dispensation.
Another
basic defect of the period was that ‘the freedom movement generation’ soon
after independence forgot all about its obligation to set examples in austerity
and high ethical standards of behavior for the next generation of ‘new rulers’
and worse, started adopting the dubious and questionable ways and ostentatious
life styles of the former colonial masters without any qualms of conscience.
Overall
the country was governed reasonably well during the first two decades.
And
then came the leaders of the subsequent generation like Indira Gandhi who did
not dare to turn the tide of affairs and tried to ride the rising crest of
popular expectations , ever stoking the fire of popular frenzy with ever more
grandiose promises of food , shelter and clothing as if they were nobody’s but
the government’s sole business/responsibility thereby dealing a death blow to
the lingering traces of initiative and self-help among the populace and setting
them on the high road to dependence and mental slavery. She soon started
surrounding herself with a coterie of unprincipled adventurers and courtiers
and embarked on a reckless process of radicalization in 1971 promising a total
breakdown from the Nehru gradualism. These scheming , self-serving and
unscrupulous politicians utilized every trick in the book to manipulate people
in the most despicable ways imaginable, institutionalized dishonesty ,
corruption, nepotism, favoritism, hypocrisy and every other conceivable vice ,
opened the doors of the legislative bodies at the state and the central levels
to criminals , bandits, rough necks and rowdy shelters , identified their
personal interests with those of the nation, set the trend of bending every
institution for personal aggrandizement and establishing family hegemony on the
country, twisted and turned the country’s constitution to their advantage and
erased whatever thin line of demarcation there was between right and wrong ,
good and evil, ethical and unethical, beauty and ugliness and moral and
immoral. Social graces and decencies and norms and mores of public life have
been to cast to winds and established parliamentary conventions and practices,
in fact, every mark of cultural and civilized conduct have come to be not only
looked down upon with suspicion but also trampled upon with disdain by upstart
politicians uncouth hooligans and ill-bred street roughs. Why, in a word, they
tried most obnoxiously and defiantly to destroy and bury the very character of
the individual fathoms deep and succeeded in their egregious endeavours to a
large extent. People were simply aghast at the perfidy of the mendacious and
manipulative politicians.
It was during this most unfortunate period in
our recent history that the grammar of reconciliation and cooperation was
supplanted by the syntax of intolerance and antagonism, and the seeds of the
politics of discord, hatred and conflict, divorced from the nobility of
collective purpose and common weal were sown.
She
mistook politics for poly tricks and soon became past master in the art and
science mesmerizing people to give her power and manipulating things to retain
it but proved a miserable flop in the matter of wielding it for larger
purposes, her vision being far too constricted and her genuine convictions
being ‘somewhere to the left of self-interest’ rather than to the left of center
as many deluded themselves into believing. To say that her campaign slogan
‘garibi hataoo’ was a mantra without a
method would be the understatement of the millennium .
She
started her career by splitting the congress party, an all-embracing and all inclusive
conglomerate of the major trends and tendencies in the political milieu in the
country at the time and soon set about transforming her faction to fully
reflect her personal identity rather than any political philosophy, principles
or policies by stifling inner party democracy so severely and thoroughly as to
drive other politicians to organise themselves around regional , religious and
caste based identities which too in no time degenerated to
individual/leader-centric outfits
thereby striking at the very root of the country’s political party system.
Allowing
ego and expediency to take the better of ethical value and moral principles has
been the bane of Indian politicians since Indira Gandhi.
Spawned
as they were by the prevailing highly demoralizing and utterly degenerate
political environment and ethos , the generation of leaders that came after
with few exceptions proved to be corrupt , cynical , opportunistic ,
hypocritical and unscrupulous politickers and manipulators. True to type, they
began looking for newer tricks to take in the voters and more sinister weapons
to subdue them with, election after election. They have surpassed their
predecessors in several departments of state craft as they practised it and
going a step ahead of them, they have even tried to place their and their
party’s interests above those of the country. Irrespective of which party or
combination of parties has been in office, they have faithfully adhered to the
pernicious doctrine of political power being synonymous with license to loot ,
which took deep roots during Ms Gandhi’s reign, and which has come to stay as
an inalienable part of Indian polity. They have freely indulged in nepotism,
favouritis , parochialism , caste ism and communal ism often by bending the laws
of the land and occasionally breaking them too in total disregard for the
constitutionally guaranteed equal rights to all in the country . On innumerable
occasions, they have politicized issues and incidents/ events jeopardizing the
nation’s interests for the sake of narrow partisan gains unmindful of their
patriotic duty not to do so on the one hand, and of the disservice they were
doing to the country by diverting peoples’ attention from the sources of threat
to national security on the other. In their ambition to realise their sordid
ends and as part of their partisan preoccupations they have started vivisecting
the polity in all possible and impossible permutations and combinations on the
basis of religion, race, region, caste, language , ideology and what not; they
have not even spared the judiciary , the legislature and the executive form
their evil machinations and diabolical designs and started going full stream
ahead God knows where. The more grandiose and reckless the promises, the more
outlandish and hair raising the gimmicks /antics, the fancier and catchier the
slogans, the more rumbustious and flamboyant the followers and the more
charismatic and audacious the leaders, the greater seemed to be their spell on
the people and pull on the voters/ electorate.
Isn’t the success of these slogan mongers,
myth makers and dream merchants and purveyors of imminent Utopia, fabricators of fantasies and peddlers
of charismatic charms in hoodwinking people election after election entirely
due to the abysmal levels of illiteracy and poverty in the country. In 50 years
of our independent rule , we have earned the dubious distinction as a nation
having the largest illiterate population with almost half the people falling
into this category as well as having a record number of the poor in the world with a little more than a third
of the population living/subsisting
below the poverty line; the United Nations Development Program’s Human
Development Report for 1995 ranked India 134 among 178 countries in the world,
6 ranks behind Pakistan. Worse still, our ranking has been steadily going down
year after year-138 in 1997 , 139 in 1998. A WHO analysis on the performance of
the health care system covering 191 member countries has placed India
This
being our dismal record , there is no wonder we are where we are with no sense
of direction or any trace of hope while the masters of illusion are having a
field day unless and until these Siamese twins –poverty and illiteracy are
tackled effectively on a war footing , there can be no meaningful democracy ,
egalitarian social structure and wholesome progress. How the politicians whose
be all and end all in life seems to be power , power at any cost miss the
wisdom of Shakespeare’s unforgettable lines-
“Man,
proud man,
Drest
in a little brief authority,
Most
ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His
glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays
such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As
make the angels weep.”
is
what beats one’s brains.
The
sum and substance of what has happened during the last fifty years of our self
rule is that there has been a distressing disregard for the rule of law and a
glaring lack of will to enforce democratic discipline---respect for others’
view points , submission to the authority of institutions created by the
Constitution and willingness to resolve issues through discussion and debate
---which has inevitably led to the disastrous result that democracy has
degenerated into mobocracy, and near anarchic conditions prevail in every walk
of life. Even the parliamentary proceedings are no different. A few days before
the golden jubilee of our tryst with destiny, the speaker of the eleventh Lok
Sabha was constrained to say that he was ashamed to preside over the session
and the Rajya Sabha chairman observed that he never wanted to be in the chair
he was occupying in the sheer anguish and distress at the prevailing
pandemonium in the two houses of the Parliament.
(
To be continued)
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