As the nation prepares to observe the first anniversary of the 26/11 invasion of Mumbai by seaborne terrorists who laid siege to India’s premier business metropolis last year and killed 173 citizens, wounded 308 and scarred the lives of thousands forever, this time of remembrance of the dead, wounded and traumatised, is also an occasion for deep introspection and reflection.
A strong case can be made that the country is better prepared to take on terrorists than it was last year. However this is also an appropriate time to reflect upon deeper issues with the objective of making life, property and possessions safer and more secure for the next generation of youth and children coming of age in contemporary India. Searching questions about the quality of the transactional relationship with neighbouring countries need to be posed, even if they cannot be easily answered in the short term.
Quite obviously something is not quite right with the fundamentals of India’s foreign policy if most neighbouring countries entertain sentiments of hostility towards us. Why despite the so-called soft power advantage — democracy, the English language, music, dance, cuisine and popular cinema — with which India is endowed, have we not been able to win hearts and minds in neighbouring Pakistan, China or Sri Lanka? In the first two cases, if the answer is Kashmir and border disputes, surely it is high time to concede some ground to buy peace and goodwill in north and north-east India? In particular, the issue of the status of Kashmir has been festering for over 60 years, as a consequence of which great cruelty has been visited upon the 7.5 million people of Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) and the Kashmir valley by Pakistan-armed guerillas and the Indian Army.
Against this backdrop of continuous low-intensity conflict in the north, will the heavens fall if Kashmir becomes an independent country, or in the worst case scenario the electorate of the state foolishly decides to accede to Pakistan? As has often been argued on this page, the national interest would be well served if conditions are created for the people of Kashmir (including PoK but excluding Jammu and Ladakh districts) to vote in a free referendum and decide their future as per India’s commitment to the UN in 1954. This democratic alternative is surely preferable to another half century of low-intensity conflict with Pakistan on the Kashmir issue of which the 26/11 terror strike is a fallout.
Likewise vis-à-vis India’s border disputes with China, it’s also time to accept that the Macmohan Line was imposed upon pre-communist China as an “unequal treaty” by the British Raj and to negotiate the Aksai Chin border boundaries in a spirit of good faith. Peace on our borders will free up resources to nurture and educate the world’s largest child population suffering chronic malnutrition and illiteracy.
In the final analysis, the power of the army in Pakistan and the communist regime in China need to be combated with the ideology of democracy for which purpose India — its foremost practitioner in Asia — needs to ally with Taiwan and the US. As has been predicted in these columns, before 2020 the great wall of communist China will crumble as dramatically as the Berlin Wall did 20 years ago, breached by the power of democracy.
Intelligentsia needs to confront corruption
A new tidal wave of casual and routine corruption is threatening to overwhelm Indian society and the nation. Even as the recently released transnational public sector corruption index of the Berlin-based NGO Transparency International ranks India among the world’s most corrupt nations, scandals highlighting the widespread defalcation and misuse of public funds countrywide are being exposed on a daily basis. Currently there is an on-going investigation into the financial shenanigans of Madhu Koda, a former daily wage mine worker who entered politics in the minerals-rich but abysmally under-developed state of Jharkhand (pop. 27 million) less than a decade ago, and has accumulated reported assets of Rs.4,000 crore. Moreover a recent application under the Right to Information Act, 2005 filed by the Times of India indicates that during the past three years, Union ministers have expended more than Rs.300 crore of public money on foreign jaunts.
Why has it been so easy for Koda who was chief minister of Jharkhand for barely a year to gift away mining and mineral concessions valued at over Rs.4,000 crore and spirit the ill-gotten gains out of the country? And why should ministers at the Centre and in the states have unquestioned access to public funds to spend at their discretion? The answers to these questions which are seldom posed by the public to their elected representatives, indicate dangerous institutional failure with momentous implications for the future of Indian democracy and society.
The premier institutions to which government ministers and officials are accountable, are Parliament and the state legislative assemblies. These constitutionally empowered legislatures were designed to rigorously examine and question government largesse and discretionary spending. Yet procedural chaos compounded by thin attendance which characterise Parliament and India’s state legislative assemblies, point towards continuous decline and imminent collapse of the parliamentary system of government. With the nation confronted with the spectre of descent into dictatorship and/or anarchy, it is the constitutional duty of the intelligentsia — intellectuals, academics and teachers in particular — to boldly speak up and demand accountability from the people’s elected representatives.
Other institutions which are constitutionally mandated to serve as checks to reckless abuse of executive power are the judiciary and the media. And while it is arguable that the media has — and is — discharging its duty of substantially exposing the profligacy and excesses of governments at the Centre and in the states, the judiciary has insufficiently protested its own emasculation by the neta-babu conspiracy.
The failure of constitutionally mandated institutions of government — compounded by widespread illiteracy and deliberately neglected public education — is the prime cause of the new malaise of casual unchecked corruption which is dispiriting the nation. It needs to be intelligently addressed to prevent the descent of Indian society into anarchy.