A useless circular argument

    A Useless Circular Argument- The Indian problem of 00 

Picking Scabs

Listing failures is like picking scabs, the only use of it is the pleasure derived from the exercise itself. Parallels can be drawn to our meditations on national failures and this habit of scab picking; maybe it won’t heal anything, but still the exercise has to be carried out for its own sake. 

Every year on the Independence Day, we listen to the famous speeches given by freedom fighters and unfurl the flag, while enthusiastic anchors list all of the areas where India has advanced. I feel that counter poise has been missing in the digital age and sometimes a light needs to be shined on the wounds taking their toll. 

Even though we have climbed the GDP rankings and improved in several areas, we haven’t yet been able to provide to our masses the kind of freedom they had hoped for. Our failures are many, ranging from law&order, education, services, poverty, civic amenities, grassroots democracy etc. For now, let’s focus on some of the more important ones which have repercussions and interlinking with all the other areas as well. 

The biggest failure of our state in the nearly seven decades of independence has to be the wretched condition of a huge chunk of our citizenry, who make it by with the bare minimum. The Nehru-Mahanolobis industrialisation plan had put industries as the prime moving force of our economy and excluded the vast underprivileged, undereducated and undereverything population that has had to eke out a meagre existence at the mercy of the ‘sarkaar’. 

It is as much a philosophical question as it is a technical one regarding the aim of our progress. Gandhiji had derided progress without compassion as the biggest threat to the people who inhabit this nation. He had viewed the wealth of the rich as a responsibility that they owed to the society. But, in a modern world, purely socialistic economic principles have long been shown to be useless for their purported ends. The more important question is that why haven’t be able to have an equitable process of progress? 

The answer is also our second greatest failure. The failure of the Indian state to provide quality education to it’s masses is not only the result of years of corruption administrators, but it’s also a gross negligence amounting to criminal wastage of our huge human resources. Since we didn’t have capital or skills requisite for industrial revolution, we ought to have developed our human resources first. Uneducated masses became a burden rather than a boon and year after year we have used them only to beat population growth records. 

Blaming UGC, bureaucrats, imperialists is a common refrain, but the present reality demands it’s own explanation. Why haven’t we been able to learn, reorient and upgrade our educational setup after so many decades of abject policy failures and ineptitude? The more important question is that why hasn’t democracy worked to propel leaders to give us an adequate educational policy? 

Deeper Into Morasses

Vexing questions require more than what scratching of surface can achieve. We need a more comprehensive systemic analysis, for if we begin to look at the many endeavours that our subsequent governments have taken and the failure rate of various policies, we should have been able to find also an equal number of out of job politicians and administrators who were responsible for the corruption and ineptitude, but sadly we don’t. 

Now again if we look back to our evolution since our first Independence Day, we’d see a unique pattern of growth, a pattern that can explain away many of our present problems. Even though we became a democracy, with civil rights for everyone and constitutional institutions to protect them; we were somehow unable to fulfil the first mandate of independence, freedom for our masses. 

Freedom entails not only the removal of foreign yolk, but also the provision of such facilities and requisite environment for personal growth. Freedom means that each and every individual has the power to make choices and to guide his/her own life. Freedom, for much of India means merely the freedom from poverty, hunger and injustice and India hasn’t been able to give them that. 

Uneducated masses voting for corrupt politicians, who in turn control and corrupt the administration and who in turn enable the corrupt politicians to perpetuate their rule and make even more money is a short description of the entire gamut of our problems. There is no incentive to be honest as the institutions themselves are fundamentally flawed in their raison d’être. 

Ever since our Sardar Patel decided to continue with the services of the Imperial civil servants and their ‘steel frame’ was allowed to remain intact, we have also unwittingly adopted the philosophy and mindset of the colonial masters while governing the country. The philosophy of regulations and maintenance of law and order is different from that of governance. While one entails controlling the population at any cost towards some end decided by the state’s leaders, the other is fundamentally about ascertaining what the people want and how to best deliver it to them. 

Toxic Equilibrium

The dichotomy between what the people want and what the leaders set about to give them has only widened over the years. The people living in Naxal areas never wanted toxic pollution and uprooting of their sacred forests, the farmers didn’t want to live at the mercy of exploitative Ahatiyas, the vast population of unemployable youth didn’t want to eke out a miserable living doing low end jobs. The politicians did want stifling control over every institution, the old business housed did want to retain their monopolies, the bureaucrats did want complex rules. 

What I want to say is that there has always been a set of people who’ve gained from failures, as if an equilibrium has been maintained to benefit some at the cost of others. The real question is then to how to reset this toxic state of things, so that the people can benefit? 

The problem has to be systemic, for if it wasn’t, then the efforts of so many well intentioned officers, politicians, agitators wouldn’t have gone to waste. The solution too has to be systematically derived. If simply the people voted out those politicians who are corrupt and thus enforced their constitutionally given rights, then the problem would be sorted out over time.

The  problem is that the people are themselves uneducated and therefore also unable to take rational choices for their own good. But first we must improve their wretched condition, before they can invest in education, which brings us back to our initial argument of improving the governance to provide the requisite resources for the people to improve. 

Mirroring Problems

It needs sustained efforts of the civic society to spread this awareness, but our fragmented society has prevented the rise of a wide based secular people’s movement. The reality is that the vast majority of the people are themselves dogmatic, insular and not in the favour of social equity. Every section of our populace wants to raise their own position in the heirarchy, to seek special powers and favours and to increase it’s own prestige and not to level the field itself.

Rumi had said that the fault that we see in others are actually our own. Maybe the spectre of evil politicians and bureaucrats is a front for our own failings to develop an inclusive mentality, to not ascribe to equal rights, to follow the rules we expect others to follow and to show fraternity for our fellow citizens, the same which we expect them to show us. 

 The educated haven’t shed their prejudices, just found new avenues to base them upon, almost every Indian cheats on taxes depriving the state of resources to take action, almost everyone bribes their way out of the punishments required to maintain law and order, almost everyone gives colludes with the corrupt system while loudly denouncing the loss of morality.

Picking scabs doesn’t heal them, maybe it even perpetuates them, but there’s a pleasure in doing that isn’t there? Because sometimes, unless it hurts, we cannot determine if the wound has healed or not.