On October 7, the first shot of what promises to be a protracted war for the hearts and minds of the Indian people was fired at a sparingly attended media conference at the Press Club, Bangalore. The Children First Party of India (CFPI), registered by the Election Commission of India — promoted by your editors after a long and arduous process spread over a year — on August 7, was publicly proclaimed. We have begun a national campaign to enroll 100 million primary members to mobilise a mighty army to lead the betrayed people of free India out of the wilderness of neta-babu socialism, which has reduced the vast majority of citizens to humiliating poverty, ignorance and beggary.
The body of evidence testifying to the beggared status of this high-potential nation is overwhelming. By every yardstick — food intake, clothing, shelter, public education and healthcare, corruption, ease of doing business — India, which less than 400 years ago generated 20 percent of global GDP, is bottom ranked among the world’s 20 worst performing economies. And perhaps the most shameful statistics of all are that 46 percent of India’s 158 million hapless children under five years age suffer severe malnutrition, and 53 percent of children drop out of dysfunctional government schools before completing elementary (class VIII) education.
While the public is numbed into acceptance, the Congress party led by three generations of under-qualified leaders which has inflicted untold misery upon the population, claims credit for partially curing the sins of its own making. Meanwhile, unmindful of the bloody history of the partition of India in 1947, the opposition BJP is hell-bent upon releasing the virus of communalism into the country’s charged environment.
Implicit in the nomenclature of CFPI and its tagline ‘Let’s Save Generation Next’ is an admission that it’s too late to save the first generation of independent India’s children, but through urgent implementation of the plans and policies outlined in the party’s manifesto, it may be possible to save the next. Although this is the core objective of the party which gives top priority to executing a detailed lib-lab-lav project to equip all 1.40 million schools countrywide with a library, laboratory and lavatories within 12 months, CFPI is not a single issue party. The party’s comprehensive manifesto (see www.childrenfirst.in) details a strategy to reduce gender crimes by 75 percent within a year; legislate Anna Hazare’s Jana Lok Pal Bill in toto; urgently legislate comprehensive police and justice system reforms; freeze defence expenditure; resolve the long-festering Kashmir dispute while negotiating Indo-China border issues; drasti-cally reform agriculture by integrating it with industry; and release the entrepreneurial drive of Indian business.
All these initiatives are not only possible, but imperative to save Generation Next. Our appeal is to all right-thinking people, and especially the nation’s 120 million youth voting for the first time next year, to register as CFPI members. Together it is possible to build a new Second Republic and realise the noble aspirations of Mahatma Gandhi and founding fathers of the Constitution. The quality of your life — perhaps life itself — depends upon deep reflection and firm resolve to make a new beginning. It’s a challenge, but also an opportunity.
Meek acceptance of laggard status
The People’s Republic of China and the Republic of India are the world’s most populous countries which have chosen mirror opposite systems of governance and socio-economic development. In the eyes of the world, we are natural rivals. Therefore it’s a matter of national shame that on almost every parameter of governance and progress, India is a distant also-ran in the global development race led by the People’s Republic. Perhaps even more shameful is that our leaders and citizenry have meekly accepted our laggard status.
Indeed among the developing nations of the third world, post-independence India is a bad advertisement for the democratic system of governance. On every vital indicator of national development — GDP, per capita income, literacy, industrial and agriculture output, foreign direct investment and ease of doing business — India is trailing way behind our communist neighbour China, whose per capita income at $9,828 is three times ours. Even on the index of foreign tourist arrivals, China (55 million per year) is a more attractive destination than India (6 million). And as if to prove its superiority, in the brief Sino-China border war in north-east India in 1962, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) gave the Indian Army a bloody nose, and could have taken Assam but for its voluntary ceasefire and withdrawal to the north of Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh. To this day, the PLA occupies several thousand sq. km of disputed territory in the north-east claimed by India, whose diplomats and leaders have signally failed to negotiate the Sino-Chinese border dispute, resulting in this country incurring vast defence expenditure which it can ill afford.
But while the bitter pill of Chinese economic and military superiority — the consequence of corrupt and inept rule of the Congress and Nehru-Gandhi dynasty which has ruled India for over half a century — has been swallowed by this country’s citizenry, what is particularly galling is that even in education our democratic republic is trailing communist China. Its 95 percent literacy (cf. India’s 74) aside, over 300 million Chinese children are assiduously learning English, while our 29 state governments are doing their best to suppress English in favour of vernacular languages.
Several Chinese universities are ranked among the Top 200 in the annual QS and THE World University Rankings (India: nil). Moreover, following reports of boorish behaviour of Chinese tourists abroad, Beijing has mandated a code of good manners to be compulsorily taught in primary-secondary education. On the other hand the vitally important subject of universally accepted etiquette — once strictly taught in all schools — is conspicuously absent from Indian curriculums.
The fault dear countrymen, is not in our stars but in ourselves — the leaders we elect, our indifferent intelligentsia and uncaring education system — that we are the world’s underlings, inferior not only to distant strangers, but to our neighbours as well.