The State of the nation -- Stocktaking on Independence Day
Is being best among the brothers good enough for India at 65?
John Dayal
[Member, national Integration Council, and National Monitoring Committee on Minority Education]
India is a miracle.
Born in a veritable bloodbath of Partition after a peaceful freedom struggle, it has survived as a strong democracy. It survived the Cold War without having to take sides, and therefore with having either Soviet troops or those of NATO or the US agencies stationed on its soil, or even the US Indian Ocean fleets such as the 8th Fleet really every brining their nuclear weapons into its deep waters. It has survived four wars with its neighbor, one of which decisively partitioned Pakistan and gave birth to Bangladesh, without allowing it to escalate beyond a limit, showing magnanimity with its adversaries and charity of a rare order in taking care of the ten million refugees from Bangladesh which would have broken the back of any other social, political and economic dispensation.
It has developed nuclear weaponry in the teeth of opposition from the nuclear powers, but also announced a “no first strike” policy, ensuring that a nuclear South Asian subcontinent does not sit on the brink of an immediate nuclear holocaust. Civil society would maintain, arguably, that India ought never have gone on the nuclear path at all. And above all, it has survived the economic meltdown of the west, though not without some grievous wounds in its rate of growth and its balance of payments account. Perhaps the lows and highs of the monsoon have been the one thing the country has not been able to control, its agriculture economy and the life of much of its population remains at the mercy of the rainfall, a shortfall spelling abject misery, an access perhaps even more.
The credit for much of this goes to some basic foundation work and ideological intervention done by Jawaharlal Nehru and then by Indira Gandhi, India’s first and third prime minister – not counting the two very short interim terms of Gulzarilal Nanda. Nehru’s commitment to secularism, codified together with Dalit rights by Constitution committee chairman Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar -- ensured a cohesive and forward looking country. Nehru's focus on scientific temper and industrialization resulted in the massive engineering powerhouses of the Public sector, and the institutions of higher science and technology which today see India on the verge of manned space flights and self sufficiency in nuclear technology.
Nehru’s, and then Indira Gandhi’s land reforms in abolishing landlordism and the old ruling order, laid the foundations of an egalitarian society. India’s nationalization of bank and insurance ensured an end to fly by night operators and assured a certain stability which even the post liberalization financial sector has not been able to match. These ensured that the fruits of democracy reached the grassroots, and made this participatory system the established norm, despite hiccups, corruption, caste politics and other issues that finally ended with the electoral reforms of the last quarter of a century. Rajiv Gandhi years later added the Panchayati raj institutions as a logical extension of those reforms, giving sa voice and local power to rural communities.
Above all, Nehru ensured an apolitical and secular Armed Forces overcoming the inherent disabilities arising from the fact that these services too were partitioned on religious lines and essentially what remained in India was a Hindu-Sikh Army with just a sprinkling of other communities.
India is therefore so different from Pakistan where the massive presence of a landlord community, and its nexus with a radicalized Army led by scions of the same classes, have ensured a continuous alternating of military and civilian rule which both look alike in their basic policies and preferences. This fatal alliance spells the death or at least incapacitation of genuine democracy. Pakistan has seen more than 40,000 deaths in various forms of violence rooted in communal and class distinctions and in the last decade, in terrorism. The regimes are at the mercy of fundamentalist armed groups within its borders whose pressures on the regime make it incapable of encouraging human rights, for one, and freedom of faith. The Christian and Hindu communities in Pakistan are in a life and death struggle with no light showing an end to their continuing nightmare.
Another neighbor Bangladesh is less militarist perhaps than Pakistan, though its major party is founded by a general. The brittleness of democracy in Bangladesh too remains a lesson. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism has kept apace with Pakistan. Sri Lanka perhaps is the worst of the neighbors which has seen a full fled civil war ending in the vanquishing of the Tamil minority which can now see only a second class citizenship in a country government by a racist regime which is also susceptible to the influence of a militant Buddhism led by a supremist monastic order. In many ways, all these are failed states. And rogues.
India shines in contrast.
And yet there are raging contractions in India’s social indices impacting on the life of its religious and social minorities who remain victims of communalism, caste, marginalization, displacement and State violence. The intricate combination of failed monsoons, usurious money lenders which include banking agencies and seed merchants, have seen unimaginable desperation in the countryside, leading to perhaps as many as 250,000 –a quarter of a million – farmers committing suicide in 17 years such states as Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.
Recent times have seen the State often at near war with its own people, specially the Tribals, who constitute about ten percent of the population, but live on perhaps twenty percent of forest land under which lies valuable iron and aluminum ore, and rare earths which the corporate sector in the country and major multinationals from Japan, Koreas, the UK, Europe such as Vedanta and Posco and our own home grown India Incorporated, covet with a vicious licentiousness . This greed ends in the deaths of many innocent men, women and children deep in the forests of Orissa, Andhra, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, which are euphemistically called the Red Corridor, or the centres of Maoists activity over the last ten years.
No less critical has been the virus of communalism. Hindutva elements seeking inspiration from a Hitler-Mussolini Europe of the 20th Century have sought to wreak havoc on Muslims, Sikhs, and finally Christians. The communal criminality is mostly rooted in the wounds of Partition, special in a deep divide between Hindus, specially the upper and middle classes and those who migrated from West Punjab, Multan, and Sindh and the Muslims, now perhaps a full 15 per cent of the population, who chose not to migrate to Pakistan. As many as 50,000 communal riots against these religious minorities over the last 65 years have seen an officially admitted 17,000 dead, and several tens of thousands wounded. [This does not include the bleeding in Jammu and Kashmir, victim of mal-governance and ill thought out policies which result in over 500,000 military and paramilitary forces being deployed to keep the piece in what is vigorously asserted as an Indian state and a people our own citizens. These two factors also result in that huge aberration in the northeast which like Kashmir sees the Army and security forces ruling the people under the protection of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which gives them powers to shoot at sight, and legalizes impunity.]
Muslims will perhaps never forget the violence against them in Gujarat 1969 and 2002 in which gender violence and trial by fire were key components. 1984 saw perhaps more than 5,000 Sikhs burnt alive, most of them in the national Capital of New Delhi, and for Christians, Kandhamal in Orissa in 2007 and 2008 will become part of community memory as the worst violence since Tipu Sultan took the Catholics of the Konkan belt into captivity and a force marched that killed so many.
The wounds may have healed, but the scars have been kept fresh by an utter miscarriage of justice, rampant impunity and an often bigoted, often corrupt and almost always inefficient criminal justice delivery system. Reforms in the judicial and police systems have progressed at snail’s pace despite several commissions of enquiry, the most significant of them the Dharam Vira commission on Police Reforms and the Justice Sri Krishna Commission on the riots against Muslims in Mumbai in 2002-3, a report whose seminal findings and recommendations could go far in inducing reforms in the police structure.
A growing middle class has not been able to generate a viable, acceptable and strong civil society that could intervene with the government and which could be bulwark against excesses of the State as seen during the Emergency of 1975-76 in which human rights and civil liberties were suspended. It was, indeed, an attack on the very Constitution of the country and its parliamentary democracy which remained suspended for much of 18 months. In fact, it sometimes seems that the middle class, now as large as 200 million in a population of 1.20 billion, often sides with the state and sometimes goads it into turning against the poor and the angry who perceives it as a threat to its own security and cosy existence. The media, now vastly expanded into corporate owned national satellite television channels and chain newspapers, also sees itself as the voice of this middle class. The result is paid news, imbedded journalism, an utter lack of investigation and no effort to voice the trauma and travails of the poor. This is why there has been no
More severe, social indices remain among the worst in the world – in terms of juvenile mortality, gender rights, untouchability and even manual scavenging, possibly the only incident of this practice in the entire world, an infamy it shares with Pakistan. Hunger and rural poverty coexist with repeated bumper crops and food reserves which are so huge that there is no place to keep them, and a tenth or more is lost to rats and other pests every year. Food delivery systems remain faulty, specially in deep urban and forest areas, as soon in the data generated by the Planning Commission. Malnutrition is rampant, especially among the very young of rural and marginalized communities. The Right to Food Act remains a matter of protracted debate and political positioning. Despite perhaps the biggest scheme in the world to transfer cash to increase the purchasing power of the most poor, now called the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee programme, a real dent has not been made in rural poverty.
India need not fear an army coup, or indeed an armed rebellion by the rural poor and hungry. Despite the occasional political skirmish, and the current Maoist phenomenon, democratically elected regimes remain safe. This should give them the strength to negotiate with the people directly, without having to take recourse to armed might. The Maoist problem is not without a solution, if there is a political will. Instead of using the Maoist violence as an excuse to deny development while using armed police to displace Tribals before handing over their sacred groves to developers and mining companies, there is need for a comprehensive policy of resettlement and compensation. Tribal rights have to be protected as any other Constitutional right of the rest of the countrymen.
Hunger, thirst, health, housing , and education are to be addressed. The Right to Food Bill has to be passed. It is now clear that Operation Blackboard has not been the success if was designed to be. The RSS has infiltrated areas where government schools did not work, setting up more than 60,000 "Ekal vidyalayas" or forest and village primary schools where young minds are being poisoned in a highly systemized way. The green revolution too has failed to reach where it should have. Rural disparities have increased. While food grain rots, millions go hungry. Food prices soar, and yet farmers do not get a fair price for their labour. The production-supply-retail line has to be looked at keeping both farmer and consumer as the focus of the policy. Is Foreign Direct Investment the answer? Many think not. Wallmart mega-stores and malls can hardly bring grains to areas of want. Credit policies for agriculture need urgent reforms to end the sinful deaths in suicides by farmers. The government needs to take a fresh look at village development, integrating all systems in a comprehensive policy which is monitored dispassionately at the block, district, state and central levels on a real-time basis.
Financial reforms and an industrial policy in the liberalization that was launched by the Narasimha Rao government back in the early 1990s patently needs updating. No one is harking back to the days of licence raj, nor does anyone really wants to cripple the private sector, specially the national and global multinationals. But barring a few, there also would be no one urging a system which spells death of the small scale sector, the weavers, the village store and the kirana shops in the neighbourhood. BT Cotton tomato and brinjal cannot be at the cost of the health of the farmers and the consumers. While government designs mechanism to end corruption in the allocation, or auction, of 3 and $ G Spectrums in the communications sector, it must show political will to enunciate policies in business and trade that do not cause misery to large sections of the population.
India also needs a safety net for the vulnerable sections of the population – workers in the private section who do not get a pension like government servants do, for the destitute, the unemployed, and the elderly. Even the capitalist west has such safety nets. President Obama’s Insurance policy is controversial not because the poorer segments will benefit, but because the rich feel they may ah veto pay a bit more. Many feel the government does not show the same concern for the poor as thirty years ago where the slogan “Garibi hatao” though not implemented even in half, still articulated a certain political will and conveyed this message to the villages of the poor.
A safety net of a different sort is needed for India’s many minorities, specially its religious minorities. The 12th Five year plan and the Prime Minister’s Revised 15 Point Programme offer a ray of hope in the distant future. But till they are implemented on the ground, they will be of little solace. The worst case is in terms of law and order, the violence against religious minorities. The government has all but aborted the anti communal violence bill devised by the National Advisory Council headed by Mrs. Sonia Gandhi. The massive campaign mounted by the BJP and the political right ensured its instant death. It was not a perfect Bill. But it had seeds of reform which gave hope to religious minorities that the regime of impunity would end,. And that the government would be able to curb hate campaigns, profiling, non judicial deaths and torture, and finally communal riots. That would have brought peace to the land. It is not too late. The government must reach into the reservoirs of the goodwill it has with large sections of people and in political courage, enact such a law
The people of India will thank the government for this.
Published in New Leader, CVhannei in the 15th August 2012 special issue as cover story]
