Incredible India!!!

India, the largest democracy in the world, a land made up of 28 states and 7 union territories, with nearly 1 billion inhabitants, India ranks second only to China among the world's most populous countries. It is not known as a Sub-Continent for nothing. Its Geography is so diverse that there is hardly any Continent in its entirety to challenge it. We have the Coldest places like the snow-capped Himalayas in the North, the driest regions like the Thar Desert in the North-West, the wettest places like the Cherrapunji receiving the highest rainfall in the North- East, Rainforests in the South and a coastline that extends over 7600 kilometers. With all this varied Topography, comes a great deal of cultural khichdi in the people of this country. There are about 22 different Languages that are officially recognized while more than a hundred that are spoken countrywide, about 6 Religions practiced and more than 90 festivals and fairs being celebrated all over the country. It has the famed history of being the World’s largest, oldest surviving civilization. Currently the world’s 12th largest economy and home to many of the world’s ever growing list of Billionaires.

Despite all this, I’m deeply saddened when I write this, and, it can be swallowed like a bitter pill that the country has gone straight to dogs!!! It appalls me when I see that so little has been achieved when much more could have been ever since India became a sovereign nation and today we get to hear about the completion of 50 glorious years of Indian Independence. In a country that has always been poverty-stricken, illiteracy ridden and facing scarcity of resources and infrastructure, I wonder whether opting to go the Democracy way was the right thing back then. Abraham Lincoln defined democracy as a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people."; but, frankly, What kind of progress can you expect out of a government that is being ruled by people whose middle names are Scams, scandals, profit, self-centered interests, mayhem and many more; very agreeably woven inside of a farcical façade of selfless service, diligence, kindness, dedicated efforts, altruism and more. There is many a reason for me to detest Democracy especially for a country like India.

Let me digress a little before I get to the details of why and how something other than democracy would have put the country in Top gear. I wouldn’t be wrong when I say that the youth of today is highly influenced by the Western Culture. A culture that is slowly but surely gaining popularity. The reason is simple……….It is too damn uncomplicated…….. It is too damn straightforward. At this stage, I’m left wondering again that if all this were true, why then did we chase the British back then, if just fifty years later, we would start to appreciate and admire their culture subduing our own. I agree that they adopted the Divide and Rule Policy which threatened the subtle harmony which we were so known to have, but, today do we stand any more unified? Many states now fight for Natural Resources, Individuality, Language superiority, Border Demarcation issues and many such other reasons. I agree that they had a policy of the Doctrine of Lapse, which stated that if the ruling Royal Family did not have a progeny; their entire assets would be automatically acceded to the British Government. I scoff at how insignificant this Policy would look today. The way the population curve is exponentially increasing, there never can arise a situation where people are ever going to run out of children. People make oodles and oodles of money, some to an extent that if their misappropriated assets were reclaimed, they could easily run the Government for months.

I believe that before having gone the Democracy way in India, we should have reached a certain milestone in social reform and economic progress. All through these following paragraphs, I shall provide some excerpts from the book titled “ Indira Gandhi, the emergency and Indian Democracy” by author P.N Dhar. The author was head of Indira Gandhi’s secretariat and one of her closest advisors through the 1970s.

In a country that performed Gheraos, bandhs, rail and rasta rokos at free will, bringing Democracy would have indeed brought in a lot of problems. As Dr. B.R Ambedkar candidly told the constituent assembly while introducing the draft constitution:- “Constitutional morality is not a natural instinct. It has to be cultivated. Democracy in India is only a top dressing on Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.” There were bound to be problems if this whole British Parliamentary System were incorporated in a single step in India. If you recall, the British system of governance had emerged in a country that had passed through a renaissance, a reformation, and an Industrial Revolution that had resulted in a large and educated middle class. The Indian decision to work a parliamentary democracy was always going to be a huge challenge.

Nehru described the entire enterprise rather sportingly as an ‘Adventure of Democracy’. His ambivalence in the matter of social discipline is obvious in his reply to a question put to him in Sweden: ‘Have you any trouble with the remains of the Satyagraha technique you adopted to gain independence?’
Nehru answered: “It is a very interesting but rather intricate question. First of all, a country which for a whole generation practiced a certain technique of opposition to the government, it is not easy to shift over to make people think differently. It may be their own government, but people still have the habit of thinking of opposing the government. Because for a whole generation they thought so .Secondly, they are apt to adopt that technique, not rightly I think, but some variation of it, just to press on some complaint or something, which is sometimes apt to be a nuisance.”

P.N Dhar writes Political culture in India has increasingly deviated from the norms of constitutional democracy over its evolution. Agitation, protest and the mobilization of public opinion on disputed issues have become more widespread than in the British Period. Protests and disagreements are now conducted as if the government is not elected but imposed. Part of the explanation for this phenomenon is that it’s a carry-over from pre-independence techniques of protest against British Rule. Ambedkar had foreseen some of the possibilities. After he had wound up the debate on the draft of the constitution, he had said: “If we wish to maintain Democracy not merely in form, but also in fact, what should we do? The first thing in my judgment we must do is to hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives…… It means that we must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non co-operation and satyagraha. When there was no way left for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the grammar of anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.”

His wise words fell on deaf ears. Some thought that he was merely attacking his old adversary, Gandhi, and nobody took his warning seriously. The disobedience of law was given a political color and interpretation. It not only carried no penalties, on the contrary it had an almost Gandhian moral aura. Gunnar Myrdal, a social democrat himself, analyzed this problem in the early 60’s and was highly critical of the Indian state for its reluctance to enforce its own laws. He called it a ‘soft-state’, which he defined as one ‘where policies decided are not enforced, if they are decided at all’, and where ‘the authorities, even when framing the policies, are reluctant to place obligations on people’. He bemoaned the fact that this reluctance is not only excused, it is also idealized.

One event that comes to my mind at this stage is the State of Emergency declared in India between June, 1975 and March, 1977 by the then President Fakruddin Ali Ahmed, upon advice by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi under Article 352 of the Indian Constitution effectively bestowing on her the power to rule by decree, suspending elections and civil liberties. During the Emergency, many opposition leaders were jailed, freedom of press was suspended and powers of the judiciary were curtailed. Although people may look at this as a form of Dictatorship, many good things happened back then which will force you to think otherwise. Here are some excerpts from the same book I was talking about earlier:-

The first impact of the emergency was in the urban areas, on people mostly of the middle class. These were impressed by the immediate gains of the emergency: No strikes, no bandhs, industrial peace, quiet on the campuses, suppression of smugglers and hoarders, stable prices and a spurt in the economic activity. The Twenty-Point programme held out hope for the alleviation of poverty for the rural poor. It included implementation of land-ceiling legislation, a big increase in the allotment of house sites for the landless, a moratorium on rural debts to give relief to small farmers, village artisans and landless farmers, and the abolition of bonded labour. All these measures provided the emergency with some legitimate political and social purpose.

Indira Gandhi felt that the results were quite satisfactory. The implementation of the land ceiling legislation, for example, yielded 19761.7 million acres for distribution among the landless as against 62,000 acres previously. Similar results were achieved in the allocation of Residential Site; over 3 million were allotted in the first year of the emergency. The 20-point economic program increased agricultural production, manufacturing activity, exports and foreign reserves. The national economy achieved high levels of growth and investment, and as strikes were non-existent, productivity increased rapidly. Communal Hindu-Muslim riots, which had re-surfaced in the 1960s and 70s, virtually ceased, and the government seemed to be working with vigor.

If such were the profound effect of an Emergency, which was like a period of Dictatorship for the two odd years it was enforced, then I start to wonder, if that should have been the way to go initially, grow and develop to satisfy the pre-requisite conditions for a successful Democracy and then make a paradigm shift toward an even brighter India Shining. Will I be able to see a novel India, the one I wanted to see twenty years ago, at least twenty years from now???

Only time will tell……