In the old days, it was the transitions from one season to the next or the anniversaries of the gods (often the same thing, under different names) that called for celebration and festivity.  Today it is usually the birth dates of recent political leaders that mark the milestones on our road to “progress”.  So one could be forgiven for hoping that the 50th anniversary of our Independence might provide a good and worthy cause for celebration.  But, then, we must also ask: celebration of what? And, of course, celebration in what manner?

Fifty years of independence have brought our country much progress on many fronts.  Our food production has multiplied three fold, our industries make possible twenty times as many goods and jobs and our power stations deliver a hundred times as much electricity as we had on the eve of our nationhood.  Certainly, there are many more people alive today with amenities and physical well being their parents and grandparents could not have dreamt of.  In such achievements we can be justifiably proud. 

Yet, there are also twice as many poor people in our country today as there were in 1947.  Twice as many illiterate, hungry and marginalised people, barely existing entirely excluded from the mainstream economy.  Worse, the number of women in this position has grown by three-fold.   Our children get less protein and fewer calories than their grandparents did at the same age.  And, despite the most valiant efforts by different governments over the decades, all these numbers continue to grow, apparently with no end in sight.

The truth is that all the economic progress, all the benefits of so-called national development over the past fifty years has been hijacked by a small, a tiny minority of our people.  They, numbering no more than a few tens of millions, can now boast of having lifestyles that are better than those of most people living in Europe, North America or Japan.  In our rapidly globalising economy, they are able to hold their own in every way: income, standard of living and consumption of resources.  The vast majority of our fellow citizens, however, must survive and subsist at levels that are no better, and probably quite a bit worse, than existed in our country at the time of independence.

All the studies, statistics, indices of economic and social well-being that are published by international bodies like the World Bank, United Nations and others show our poor, beleaguered nation near the bottom of every list of desirable achievements.  Whether it is income, jobs, nutrition, health, status of women, or freedom from corruption, India seems to be competing for last place.  What has happened to the brilliant future that independence promised?  What has happened to our age-old traditions and virtues that we regularly extol to others?  And what has happened to the qualities of caring and sacrifice our leaders so amply demonstrated on the route to independence.  And what can we do to put our country back on its rightful track?

The promise betrayed can most clearly be seen in the eyes of the 300 odd million village women in our country who, despite the allocation of massive government funds in their names, work harder today, and get less for their effort, than ever before.  These are the women who spend their entire waking hours in one drudge task after another, in addition to walking dozens of kilometres every day to fetch water, fuel and fodder to keep their families alive.  The natural resources on which they directly depend for their livelihoods are now depleted and in many places long gone: trees, soils, water.  The control they have over their lives is close to zero.  By what definition can they be said to be the free citizens of a democracy?

And there are many hundreds of millions others, living in our towns and villages whose lives are not much better. 

By mindlessly mining our resources and by cavalierly dumping our wastes and pollutants into the environment around us, we not only harm the lives of the poor and the productivity of our natural heritage and patrimony.  We also undermine the ability of future generations to sustain themselves in the manner they should be entitled to.  The technologies we have chosen – or rather, mindlessly copied from the West – the resource management methods we have adopted and the institutions of governance we have evolved seem now to be largely inappropriate to our needs.  Our whole economic system is based on a hit and run attitude that has already started to rebound on us in the successive disasters we face, not only in our social framework  and life support mechanisms, but also in our body politic with increasing frequency. 

And what about our values?  If one is to believe the reports in the newspapers, we seem to have become a nation of liars, cheats and thieves.  “Everyone for himself …” seems to have become the motto, even before the age of liberalisation and privatisation.  Nowhere is our moral decay more starkly evident than the way we treat our animals, in the very country which originated the concepts of ahimsa and reverence for all life forms.  Or our fellow citizens, for that matter. 

The person in the street blames the nation’s leaders for bringing us to this pass.  And, of course, in many senses he or she is right.  Genuine and dedicated leadership is a gift our country gradually renounced over the few years after we became a nation.  But, even so, why such a precipitate decline in the morals and fortunes of our country?

The answer probably lies in the fact that the systems of governance we adopted did not have the necessary elements of checks and balances needed to make ours a truly democratic country.  Our people do not, in fact, have sufficient say in how their government should serve their needs, as presumably the founding fathers would have wished them to have.  This led to the rise of political leadership of ever-lower calibre and of even lower commitment to the national good.  This in turn led to the usurpation of the real power by a cadre of narrow-minded, self-seeking, time-serving bureaucrats.  And these are largely the causes of many of our national ills: poverty, alienation, petty corruption and runaway population growth.

When we became independent, many recent historical events were uppermost in the minds of our founding fathers.  The apparent effectiveness of the modern industrial system, the apparent success of the Soviet Union in achieving distributive justice, and the real horrors of the country’s partition and the need to maintain unity of what was left of it – all these factors led us to adopt a constitution and political system that actually ended up by combining the worst aspects of colonial and Soviet centralisation.  The result:  the names and skin colour of our rulers changed, but their attitudes and behaviour remained the same.  This was a sure recipe for alienation among the people, who deprived at the moment of getting freedom and becoming the sovereigns, instead found themselves the subjects of a new class of princes – the political and bureaucratic elite. 

Although recent efforts to liberalise the economy may well bring back some of the control people would like over their own lives, not much can be achieved without a commensurate liberalisation of the polity.  Mahatma Gandhi understood democracy.  For him, as it should for us today, democracy meant that power flows upwards from the communities and villages of our country, as it does in genuine democracies elsewhere.  He went further, by introducing village level institutions to ensure social justice and equity.  All we need to do is to replace our colonial institutions by a true people’s democracy. 

The changes needed are quite fundamental.  They will require deep analysis.  Before the nation, through its institutions of government, can be expected to deal with them objectively and meaningfully, they must be studied in detail, and presented to the public with the pros and cons carefully worked out.  For this reason, we strongly endorse the idea proposed by People First of setting up a Sovereign Rights Commission for bringing to parliament the reforms that our people, the actual sovereigns, wish us by referendum to institute.   q

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