For over four decades now, it’s been apparent to all but the completely blind or the utterly senile that India is a blundering, doddering democracy that has totally lost its way.
A soft state, to borrow Gunnar Myrdal’s terminology, where the government institutions have become so weak and corruption so endemic that the Indian state has failed to provide the most basic needs like security, water, food, transport, shelter, toilets and uninterrupted electricity to its citizens.
Six decades after independence, India’s Silicon Valley Bangalore reels under massive blackouts because of acute electricity shortage, at least four million of Mumbai’s 16 million people live in filthy conditions that people here in America wouldn’t subject their dogs to and hundreds of thousands of Chennai residents inhale the noxious stench of the Cooum day and night.
And seven million Mumbai commuters travel every day in packed cattle cars that even the most depraved Nazis would flinch from using to transport Jews to Auschwitz or Belsen for the final solution. In the last five years alone, Mumbai commuter trains have killed over 20,000 people.
Let the clowns shout Mera Bharat Mahan and the Alisha Chinais croon Made in India till their throats are hoarse but we say Tera Bharat Bahut Gandha Hai because India’s political institutions have all but decayed and atrophied with the fading from the scene of India’s first generation of political leadership, the Nehrus, Sastris and Patels.
In their place rose a new degenerate political class in the late 1960s – coinciding with the rise of Indira Gandhi and her shameless, bootlicking minions in the different states – for whom politics became the shortest path to the desired trinity of power, pelf and privilege.
The apogee of the political decline was reached with the Emergency between 1975-77 and ascent of vermin like Sanjay Gandhi and court jesters like D.K.Barooah whose contribution to the Indian political lexicon was the asinine slogan India is Indira, Indira is India.
As institutional structures were replaced by individual fiat, the first casualty was the public interest.
Four decades ago, the foremost political scientist of our age Samuel Huntington wrote prophetically in his classic work Political Order in Changing Societies:
A government with a low level of institutionalization is not just a weak government; it is also a bad government.
How true.
Study after study in state after state has documented that very little of the vast sums apportioned to the poor actually reach the intended beneficiaries in India, whether it’s Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh or any of the other states.
Neither the Sarkaria Commission nor the Shah Commission, Grover Commission, Maruti Affairs Commission, Bofors inquiry or the numerous other commissions that spent the people’s money to look into alleged improprieties involving the high-and-mighty have yielded anything but employment for a few retirees.
Plunder and pillage is not the mere monopoly of the netas but has seeped Continue reading »
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