by P.R.Viswanathan
Only a year back, on August 15, 2010, I remember reviewing my life – not just the 63 years of independence that I had completed but as far back in time as memory could carry me. With all that I have suffered over the centuries and with all the problems that beset me, I still felt good and healthy and optimistic about the future. But now, suddenly, I feel old and tired and depressed. In these twelve months so much water has flown, muddy and murky, through my veins – down the Yamuna and Ganga all the way to the Cauvery. My children, you have let me down and how! So often in the past, I have chided some of you for giving into greed. You did not listen and I had begun to accept it as inevitable. Yet, I could not have imagined that greed would lead to corruption of such disastrous proportions. I had even learnt to accept this shameful phenomenon of money changing hands but I seem now to be suffering from a galloping cancer of corruption; all limits are being breached and new frontiers opened. My children speak not of crores but thousands of crores involved in scandal after scandal. It is not just the size of unaccounted money changing hands for the wrong reasons that worries me; all this is leading to the corruption of all the values I stand for, the corruption of my very soul.
There was a time when men and women cared for the environment. They were satisfied and grateful that there was the earth below and the sky above their heads. Now they see an opportunity to make money from both – earth and sky – land deals and sale of spectrum.
For centuries, for ages, my children worshipped me as Bharat Mata and my land as Bhoomi Devi. I yielded plenty and they cared for me in every way. They watered me, fed me with manure and they rested me; they let me lie fallow till I recouped. My poor sons and daughters were forced sometimes to part with their little holdings of me and they wept. And look at what have you done to me now, especially in the last one year!
The holy waters of the Ganga continue to be threatened. It is shameful that you allowed one of my sons to fast unto his death for the sake of the Ganga, which all of you profess to hold sacred. I am beginning to lose my trust in most of you. For years now, since independence, I have observed and suffered this strange trait in most of you: you are content with making lofty statements; the persistent hard work that is required to realise the ideals you mouth so glibly is forgotten. You have carried on extensive indiscriminate mining. The rich thick foliage which covers me is peppered over with the dust of illegally mined mineral, and the land at many places is withering fast. Is this is how you ravish me, your own mother? Being illegal activity, this mining yields no revenue to the government. And mining is only one example. In how many industries and activities are taxes paid properly? Why does India rank so poorly in the world in tax compliance? Is this is how you cheat me, your own mother? But you are not content with that. You trade in land amongst yourselves for big money benefiting always those of you who already have too much wealth. The government takes away vast swathes of land which give you all food to eat and you construct not roads or railway or bridges or canals but huge ugly high-rise buildings to house (and worse, to provide needless second and third homes to) a greedy middle-class. Is this how you buy and sell me, your own mother?
In all the frenetic construction activity, where do my poor children figure? They continue to live in hovels – captive vote-banks for heartless politicians. There is always hope of course. Ratan of Nano fame has just announced that his group will construct small houses for the poor. I know they will be a lot better than those creaking leaking holes in the wall that the government has come up with in Dharavi. Ratan! I expected nothing less from the house of Tatas. I only wish you had done this earlier and not put the car before the house.
Fortunately there are a few other streaks of silver like Ratan.
The press and the television channels have been doing a great job. Yes, they shout and scream and do tire me out by frequent high decibel repetition. Never mind! I owe them a great debt. Without them, there would be far less justice meted out to my underprivileged children. Jessica Lal and Arushi Talwar, Nitish Kataria and Ruchika Girhotra would all have gone unavenged.
Some of my valiant children have put up a fight, resisted the acquisitive and rapacious instincts of those in power – political and economic. How are they being treated?
The brave judges of the Supreme Court have done much – to safeguard the environment from the noxious fumes of vehicles, to provide for fair compensation to landowners, to free and to speed up the investigative agencies in performing their tasks and more. You burden them with work; you don’t even appoint enough judges.And you accuse them of judicial overreach, judicial activism.
Anna Hazare first and later Swami Ramdev took up the issue of corruption. You – those in government and Parliament – did your best to discredit Anna and his team and create divisions among them. You questioned their right to make law – a task that you claimed is the duty of the elected representatives. You challenged them to get themselves elected and create laws they wanted. But they did do that; they elected you and you did nothing. Do they not then have a right and a duty to question and protest?
With Swami Ramdev who demanded return of the black money of Indians in banks abroad, you behaved even more shamelessly. The police descended on him and his followers at dead of night and forcibly evicted them from the Ramlila grounds. They even laid hands on the women and one of them is in hospital in a serious condition. You have of course done nothing on your own to bring back our national wealth. The Supreme Court stepped in and appointed a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to go into the whole issue of black money. You cried foul. You said in open court that the order of the SC was based on “certain concessions, admissions, submissions and acknowledgments” made by the Solicitor General who had left the service and that these “concessions” were not binding on the Government. Your response was, to say the least, incredible, a travesty of law and propriety.
What of my lawmakers? It is not just the LokPal bill over which you have created a record of sorts by dithering for 43 years and which has now become a byword for the unconscionable delays characteristic of Indian government. Scores of other bills have been held up in Parliament. In the states, numerous bills already passed await the assent of the governors.
What I have said should be enough for all of you to hang your heads in shame. Yet nowhere have you reached such an all-time low as in your handling internal security and foreign affairs. A fine upright government officer is burnt alive in Maharashtra by the oil mafia. A respected journalist is killed in broad daylight by the underworld. And that in Mumbai – my prime city, the beehive of commercial enterprise! Once again, Mumbai has been attacked by a bomb blast by enemies of the state. Once again, you seem to have been caught napping. Where are the CCTVs? Why were there not enough vehicles to transport the injured and the dead in a dignified manner?
What are you doing about Pakistan? I see the foreign secretaries of the two countries smiling before the cameras after meetings. What do you expect from these meetings? Haven’t we had enough of them in the past? What good have they done? Those responsible for the tragedy of 26/11 are not just roaming free in that country but have once again, only last month, vowed to wage a jihad in Kashmir and all over India. What else do you expect when all you do is whine and grumble and do everything possible to show yourself up as a soft state? All investigative breakthroughs into the crimes committed on my soil seem to be coming from the U.S. You keep looking up to that country to act on your behalf. That is not all. The scion of the royal family thinks fit to tell the U.S Ambassador that the jihadis are not such a threat to our security as saffron terror.
These days, I don’t even hear that routine clichéd statement that the government would normally make before every Indo-Pak talk: “Jammu & Kashmir is an integral part of India.” That has been completely dropped from diplomatic discourse with Pakistan. What is the problem? Why are so many of you beset by doubt? Why are you apologetic? Kashmir is part of me, do you understand? It was always part of meand came to me legally and rightfully in partition.Remember I accepted partitionbecauseof the machinations ofa few of my misguided and selfish Muslim children (they were the highly educated and affluent ones, mind you, not those honest-to-goodness commoners) backed by the evil British. I accepted partition but never the pernicious two-nation theory on which it was based. For if I were to accept that Hindus and Muslims are in essence two different peoples, representing two different cultures who cannot live together, then I would have had to send all my Muslim children packing to Pakistan. I would have had to negate everything I stood for through the centuries. So whence this hesitation? Why do you not assert yourself with Pakistan? Why do you let me down repeatedly?
But I must be balanced. I must not allow the events of one year to overwhelm me. These events, as John Maynard Keynes said in a different context, are too close to be clearly visible. I must not lose my perspective. Let me think of the other difficult times that my children have put me through. I recall the long dark nights of the emergency and dictatorship in 1975-77, when the best of my sons and daughters were thrown in jail and there was a pall of gloom and despair. I came out of it with my fledgling democracy stronger and more mature. Then I remember 1990, when I had to pledge my stock of gold to borrow abroad for my basic requirements. That shame induced you all to introduce long-overdue reforms and today, I am regarded as an economic powerhouse. So this too shall pass – this inordinately long season of scams.
I am angry and sad and hurt but I am a mother after all. So this year too, on the 15th of August, when you unfurl the tricolor and shout “Bharat Mata Ki Jai”, I will not remain unmoved. I will bless you all: the brave ones who are tirelessly fighting corruption and my poor, underprivileged and hapless children who are suffering it.
And I will also bless all those who have sinned against me. May the Gods steer you along the right path. Promise me a better year ahead. Jai Hind.
P.R.Viswanathan is a born and bred Mumbaikar, a career banker and now a consultant in microfinance. After retiring and setting up as a consultant working from home, he has indulged his passion – writing. The subjects that interest him are parochial politics, microfinance, terrorism and deficit financing and above all India.
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