Before starting off, I would like to make a note here that upon request I have done this piece of work in a hurry, I will edit the following piece of work and reload it by the second week of January.
It didn’t hurt when Reena Bhanshali, a 19 year old girl was stripped naked and raped to death by political gangsters in Uttar Pradesh in front of her family and friends. It didn’t hurt when Manjunath was killed trying to fight corrupt practises. It didn’t hurt when an engineer was beaten to death recently for not paying the price for the birth of a Politician on some particular day some fifty years ago. Several such events that we came across did not hurt us, but, but, but, it hurt when we were scared to walk down the road with the fear of being shot down. Then, we realized that we are no longer safe cocooned in our shells and that we need to come out and voice out our opinions.
Every Tom, Dick and Harry is quick to point out that corruption is the root cause of India’s problems. This is India’s biggest problem, not corruption, but the fact that every Tom, Dick and Harry is talking corruption. These Toms, Dicks and Harrrys who have outnumbered the others by over a hundred crores, can really do nothing to help India’s cause, not because they do not have the power or the will, but because they have written a one word answer to an essay question. We have conveniently pointed all our problems towards corruption, letting the word form an umbrella that has loyally been protecting almost all of India’s problematic elements. In fact, we are hardly acquainted with these elements, our secret friends for ages. These elements have formed such strong relationships, some of them also as complex as Indian joint families.
India is home to every sixth human being. India is also home to every third poverty ridden person in the world. The government keeps allocating funds for various programmes and projects to help the poor. Where does all this money go? Here - It takes Rs.3.64 to deliver Rs.1 to a poverty ridden family. 72 percent of the Indian population do not have access to sanitation, 38% do not have access to safe drinking water.
Stunning facts, but not as stunning as the fact that there are 33000 registered NGOs in Chennai alone trying to put a full stop to these problems that are staring at our faces. Some of them have worked hard, but all we can compare this work to is to taking from a well and filling up a tank that has two outlets, one being used by the bureaucracy and another rusted and broken pipe connecting households. And now, metaphors apart, it is time to get to the point, which really is more of a question – Having concluded that we definitely need to look under the umbrella term of corruption and root out problems, where do we start? (One point to note here is the fact that we will come later to various reforms that are required. We are now thinking in lines of the existing framework) Majority have said “Dirty Politics” is where first changes have to take place. For this, we need the whole voting population to rate the government by performance. By voting population, we mean about seventy crore people, of which sixty crores don’t know how the government functions and their vote primarily depends on three factors – gifts promised, dislike for one party and trying to vote for the winning party. The Political parties have muscle men and clout that can overpower the law and to compliment this they hardly have to struggle to inject huge masses with herd mentality. There are options available in the system to curb bad politics, like Article 49’o’ for example, but elite class hardly knows this, forget the illiterate masses. The other rule that is ever so blatantly ignored is that Political parties cannot spend more than Rs.1500000 on election campaigning per constituency, a number that is probably one hundredth of what is spent. And no reward for guessing where the money is recovered from, of course with interest and let’s spare the interest rates for now.
So, we come to the next possible start – illiteracy. For this we need schools to function, it is said that 25% of teachers from all Govt schools in India do not come to school everyday. Let us assume that this issue can be solved. Are we asking children who eat less than a meal a day to go to school and study? It is like asking Indians to win the football world cup. Wondering what the connection is? Simple, both are impossible. Poverty should be alleviated before we can talk about literacy, having said this, you wouldn’t believe that the government actually realized this and allocated Rs.4000000000 for the alleviation of poverty in the 10th Five year plan, a sum of Rs.8000 per poor family per month. No reward for guessing if the money reached the poor families or not.
We have just gone through the trailer, the movie is never ending. We can actually make a game out of it and make some money too. Since we Indians are good at nomenclature, we’ll name it vicious cycles. Ask your opponent to name any problem that he has a solution for and bet on it that you’ll show him a problem that will dilute his solution beyond application. Trying to solve a problem in India, means overcoming a bigger problem in the process which in turn leads us to yet another and this goes on until we come back to where we started from. Any problem, I assure you, any problem from be it as big as terror to problems as small as people spitting on the roads, will fall in this vicious cycle.
The irony is that even as we try to look at the vicious cycle in the eye and say we are going to break it, we are faced by the unique and amusing AALIYS syndrome. Accept, Adjust and Live In Your Shell. While the syndrome makes people say “This is India and nobody can do anything about it”, the reaction is stunningly simple – create a shell around ourselves which includes just our family and close friends. The societies’ problems can stay outside. Our only interaction with the society is our way of making our livelihood and facilitating basic amenities that the society will anyway throw at us. Our county is made up of crores of such shells creating a very fragile social framework.
We couldn’t be more correct in assuming that there is no way in which we can remove these damned shells that insulate the society from the goodwill of individuals. Therefore, when we look at a solution for the crores of suffering Indians, we have the perfectly knitted vicious cycles that are completely aware of the “shell factor”. However, we also know that change is required at the level of the psyche and mentality of the people to the level of huge political decisions. Now this, is the greatest grandfather of catch-22 situations, because it involves the lives of every sixth homo sapien on the planet. The solution has to contain a bottom-up approach and a top-down approach and should be a combination of all the elements and forces coming together, either for themselves or without alternative choices. There is one and only one way that this is possible, which is through a peaceful revolution that is built around dialogue, participation of the masses and interaction between the policy makers and the policy sufferers. The revolution should be a movement of the people towards belief, a movement of the defaulters towards fear, but most importantly, a movement of the people from their shells into the country that has so much to offer.
This is probably the first time that we are pondering over a revolution without having thought of what the revolution is going to be all about. The field of first action that is required to overpower the catch-22 situation has to be common to every citizen of India.
Appendix – history’s backing
One more way of deciding the field of first action is starting from history of histories. When human beings shifted out of survival of the fittest and took up a more social form of living with one objective – sharing products and services. Society, whatever it means to the billions of people around the world, boils down to the fact that is it made up of shared products and services with scope for development of each individual attributed to his or her skill, including skills of corrupt practises. When corruption entered the scene fights arose creating the need for a governing body. This evolved to the current day government, making it safe for us to conclude that the government came into existence for maintaining order. It is this order that is in question in the Indian society and the Indian government. Thus bringing us to the conclusion that to we start afresh and resurrect the Indian social framework we have to go start with the law, order and judicial system which is the sole reason for the existence of the government.
