| Nine commissions and 21 years after the anti-Sikh riots, no one's been convicted "" some track record! |
| As we celebrate the 58th anniversary of our Independence, it is a good time to ponder over some of the features of our polity. For one thing, are we becoming increasingly intolerant? Consider how L K Advani and the prime minister have been criticised for their remarks about Jinnah and the British respectively. |
| It almost seems as if patriotism requires us to be rude and insulting to foreigners! And, for some, who hold veto power over government decisions, any agreement with the Great Satan is, by definition, anathema. This apart, when was the last time you heard or read about any studied debate in Parliament on an important issue? |
| Secularism is part of the original Constitution; socialism was not, although our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, swore by democratic socialism. It was his daughter who brought socialism in the Constitution. |
| To be sure, socialism itself has taken so many avatars in modern history that the Fabian socialists a century back would hardly recognise some of them. Tony Blair's Labour Party has not made too many changes from the Thatcherite model: Blair even persuaded it to drop the historical commitment to public ownership of the means of production. Germany's Social Democrats are following Blair's New Labour. |
| The Chinese communists, while following a blatantly capitalistic path to GDP growth, describe it as socialism with Chinese characteristics under which, as Deng Xiaoping famously remarked, the colour of the cat is immaterial so long as it catches mice. |
| He was also honest enough to admit that wealth is glorious and that, inevitably, some will get richer earlier than others. His prophecy has come true: even as the Chinese economy grows at a near double-digit speed, income disparities between and within regions and cities are growing. |
| We also show our faith in socialism in various ways: the one attracting maximum debate lately was whether a 5 or 10 per cent divestment in Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (Bhel) would sully the purity of our commitment to public ownership in the Common Minimum Programme. |
| Another equally portentous issue seems to be the question of foreign investment and its percentage in different sectors. Such life and death questions leave little time for issues like how to create 10 million real, sustainable jobs a year (the operative word is sustainable); how to make sure that every child gets a chance for schooling at least by the seventh decade of Independence; how to provide water and road communication to every village so that women don't need to carry water jugs on their heads for kilometres; and so on. |
| As for the Employment Guarantee Scheme, the ruling party's supreme leader, in her compassion for the poor, has desired that it should cover every rural household "" all 150 million of them. This may cost Rs 1.5 trillion! Where will the money or the administrative resources to implement it come from? |
| Printing notes will presumably solve the first problem. The second is irrelevant since, in any case, we are reconciled to barely 15 per cent of the poverty alleviation assistance reaching the intended beneficiaries. The local netas, babus and assorted middlemen are salivating at the opportunities opening in our 59th year of Independence. |
| Much of the public sector has become the private preserve of the netas and babus in Delhi, and sometimes of the employees. Our socialism demands protection of existing jobs, even if this comes at the cost of creating many more new ones. |
| The babus are so confident that they can get away with anything that the first thing Goswami (remember the Bihar flood relief scam?) did on being caught was to withdraw his resignation from the civil service. He knows where he is safest. |
| What about secularism? My own understanding of secularism came in the 1940s while growing up in Amaravati, a town then prone to communal clashes. During times of riots, the mullas from a nearby mosque, whom we would rarely see otherwise, used to spend nights in our home, confident that they would be safe. |
| More recently, during the recent Mumbai floods, my secretary, after six hours on the street, found food and shelter with a Muslim family, along with a hundred others in similar straits. At the same time, so many places of worship of all religions, Hindu, Muslim, Christian Sikh, Jain and so on, offered food and shelter to everybody regardless of caste or creed. |
| For our political masters, however, secularism consists of denying that a crore of Bangladeshis have illegally migrated into India; and of supporting the mullas' decision to force a raped woman to divorce her husband and marry the rapist, incidentally her father-in-law; of attending Iftar dinners. |
| What about the Nanavati Commission report on the anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi in 1984? Wait and see "" so far not one conviction after 21 years and nine commissions enquiring into 3,000 killings! A Guiness Book record?
Email: avrco@vsnl.com |
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