On her sixty-second birthday as a modern woman, the salt-and pepper, gracefully draped sari and elegant pearls that we were hoping for is lost in a dishevelled visage. She’s also turned cruel with age. She has abandoned ahimsa and doesn’t hesitate to get rid of people who inconvenience her, sometimes setting them aflame publicly. She also looks askance when others skirt their duty.
What an unbearable creature she will make, if she continues to age like this. It’s time for a mind-and-body makeover. Call in the surgeons and spiritual gurus now. Fix it, here’s how.
A good start for the political class would be to stop funding their elections with unaccounted money which they take for granted, like celebration confetti. Few Indians have a credible estimate of how many crores go into funding elections, but we all know that parties spend their term ensuring they make enough money on the side, to fund the next. Truth is, while that may have been the only way to stay in place some years ago, examples such as Bihar and Gujarat show that law and order, better infrastructure and amenities are the real drivers for voters. Development politics scores sustainably higher than a free television set or several kilos of rice for a vote. So, instead of forcing businesses to give to parties, coax them to pump that money into amenities around which they do business.
We need to reconstruct our national character, so link rewards to productivity rather than to entitlements. Social sector schemes on which we spend a good portion of our national budget may be a win-win formula for staying in power, but it risks creating a mammoth slouch-couch. It propagates an army of people who don’t feel any particular need to work for what they are getting, but feel entitled to it anyway. To be sure, there will be some communities whom we will need to support with entitlements in the short term, but why not link such drawing rights to what we need, say, a basic minimum level of education? So while we give, we also improve their ability to stop taking.
Please tell us how the government does business. We want to know. In an age of digitisation there is no reason why government rules should be shuffling between the desks of babus hiding under arcane laws and brown files, who encourage us to bypass them in order to do business. If streamlined and put online for all to see, it reduces the maneuverability of rent-seekers. A mouse click could make for a cleaner establishment and eject the businessman out of government.
Limit the power of the politician and make it truly punishable for him to interfere or influence independent institutions or authorities. This will mean empowering the gate-keepers and lawmakers, and reinstating the independence that they were meant to have in the first place. Fix the judiciary by putting a strict time line to cases, civil and criminal, so that those litigating know that they can’t drag on cases for a generation, making it a test of patience rather than justice.
It would be good to make public the track record of those who govern us and raise the bar on who will qualify for it and retain the role. We have a right to know whether the man who sets the rules is a graft-magnet. The highest moral character has to have equal weight with the ability to govern and represent, because it tells the world what our national moral quotient is.
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For many years now, we have managed to dress India in time for the party and cover the dark spots with some artful make-up. Trouble is, she can no longer do with a dab of powder and a dash of colour. That kind of make-up, sooner or later, melts in the harsh light, as it is starting to.
Anjana Menon is Executive Editor, NDTV Profit. The views expressed here are personal