The post election prospect fills me with dismay. The men and women who would rule then are all chiefs with no Indians. That’s what I wrote of the Janata Party in 1977 when Morarji Desai, Charan Singh, Jagjivan Ram, Chandrashekhar and others were all prime ministers in waiting. It’s the same again with Mamata Banerjee, Arvind Kejriwal, J. Jayalalithaa, Naveen Patnaik, Mayawati, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi and others dreaming of the top position. If Mr Modi with his jibes, taunts and high powered propaganda seems the least unlikely of the bunch, that bears out the Bengali saying that the fox is king in a bamboo grove. But the most that even the most saffron loyalist claims is that he will get enough seats to be able to cobble together a coalition. That’s what Morarji Desai did and with what results!
The media plays up to these straw figures. It bestows gravity on triviality. Lee Kuan Yew’s hackles rose when I suggested once that India’s newspapers were exciting in their outspokenness. “Exciting in what sense?” he demanded. “Exciting in the sense of A versus B versus C?” He didn’t find them “exciting in the sense of a vision, of a new India and how to get there”. There wasn’t any serious content. “The newspapers were quite happy as far as I could make out with the status quo, with what India was achieving, and not concerned with what was not there.” He was speaking of the press in the 1950s and 1960s. “I did not see enlightenment. I saw confusion.”
What would Lee have said of the hectic, high pitched TV tamasha in the run up to the elections? If newspapers were immersed in trivial politicking instead of questioning and examining the fundamental reasons for under achievement, TV is a permanent circus. If the press did not analyse the reasons for backwardness or outline solutions, TV is even more reluctant to engage in issues that bear on the aspirations of 1.2 billion Indians. I have yet to watch an in depth interview where instead of busily pirouetting as showman hell bent on scoring points, the interviewer hammers away at questions like our neglected infrastructure, communal stability or foreign direct investment. We would know then whether there is a vision beyond television.
India desperately needs more and better schools throughout the countryside instead of a proliferation of pretentious universities and deemed universities that churn out more and more unemployed and unemployable graduates.
Medical care is a scandal. There may be institutions that turn out qualified nursing sisters who are competent and take pride in their profession, but any seasoned ayah or bai is more knowledgeable and has a better sense of hygiene that many newly trained (if that be the right word) young nurses I come across.
The recent massacre of 15 jawans in Chhattisgarh again highlighted the gravity of the security challenge India faces. Nothing moves without what is called “speed money”. One reason why railway accidents are so commonplace is that essential equipment is not properly maintained. A public facility like the renamed India Post, once the country’s pride and the theme of many romantic ballads, has all but collapsed, explaining the popularity of expensive privately run courier services.
The police are thoroughly corrupt. A creaking judiciary is collapsing under the burden of its own backlog of cases. One even hears whispers of military discontent over insufficient ammunition for training.
Of course the contenders for office heaven alone knows why self seeking operators who march under the flag of convenience of various political parties are always called “leaders” know all this only too well. Yet, they must be forced publicly to confront the mess for which they are in part responsible. It would be instructive for voters if TV anchors presented politicians with evidence of their handiwork and demanded explanations as well as recipes for the future instead of acting as if they themselves were prima donnas.
Hours of prime viewing time is now squandered on the implications of the mass rally that never was with Mamata Banerjee and Anna Hazare or the devastation of Mumbai’s Churchgate station when Aam Aadmi Party cadres reportedly ran amok. All right, it’s diverting to watch Mr Kejriwal, that nine days’ wonder of political life, riding an autorickshaw or staring out of a train window but neither shot tells us anything about his plans to ameliorate public grievances.
We have not been treated to any comparative analyses of the action programmes contemplated by Ms Banerjee, Mr Kejriwal, Ms Jaya Lalithaa, Mr Patnaik, Ms Mayawati or Mr Yadav. All we know of Mr Modi are the boasts broadcast by his loyal henchmen. After all these years of meticulous grooming, the not so young Mr Rahul Gandhi remains the Great Enigma of political life. All this goes to the heart of India’s survival as an independent nation. And that is far more relevant than the superpower illusions of some politicians.
The late 18th and early 19th centuries were years of chaos because governance had failed, institutions broken down and no pretender (read today’s “leaders”) boasted a clear title to rule.
A European witness to those turbulent times, the Comte de Modave, wrote that in the dereliction of Delhi where more than a quarter of the houses had been destroyed, “the palaces of the nobles were all in ruins, the only houses in good repair were those belonging to merchants and bankers, and whichever way you looked you could only see piles of desolation”.
The future may not be quite so dramatic. But it promises to be equally bleak. Merchants and bankers may scoop out the fat of the land, but the rest of the community waits in trepidation for the transition from frying pan to fire.
