History's detritus

It's a sight that distresses me no end every year on January 26. The hordes of children from dispossessed backgrounds with outstretched hands, trading the tricolour for small sums of money. Every year I tell myself, next year this sight won't be there, India is emerging, India is a coming superpower, there will be no beggars in the India of my times.

Every year, though, the Fates mock me as it does every Indian. The number of outstretched hands won't go away, it only increases every year. If the mountain insists on coming to Mohammad, then Mohammad will refuse to go to the mountain. Thus, last year, I didn't stir out of the home, and thus did not feel depressed on January 26.

But I did think of those early years, when one was steeped in innocence and hope for the future. Belting out Bharati's fervent songs in the thatched Tamil medium Montessori school in a corner of Chennai on Republic Day, dressed in crisp, hand-washed uniform, saluting the tricolour. The passionate words still reverberate in my ears: Thani manidanukku unavillaiyenil indha jagattinai azhitthiduvom (if a single man were to starve we will burn the world).

O, how those verses roused us! That was the vision of Free India that propelled those who struggled so that we may be free. Today, we -- the children of that freedom -- wonder where we have gone wrong. Will Bharati burn us up if he were still around? Or will he too learn to roll up his sun-filmed windows and drive on? Kadam kadam badhaye jaa, khushi ke geet gaaye jaa.

Little had changed, I found, as I chanced to be around in a little getaway outside Mumbai one Republic Day and found the children of the local school gathered around the fluttering flag, chorusing Netaji's rousing anthem for his army as they marched on the nation to set it free. I often ask myself: Will history have been different, and kinder, to India if Subhas had achieved his dream instead of Nehru?

The answer is simple. India was, and is, never short of vision for its future. Where we failed was in the execution of the dreams that giants saw. When pigmies are the inheritors, rather than expand their vision to accommodate the dreams they find it easier to shrink them to their size. That is India's failing.

Once the independence-era leadership passed away -- and they were men and women with lofty ideals -- leadership passed on to small-minded people without a pan-Indian outlook, without a vision for the future.

It was in this time that nations to our East, co-sanguineous by culture and religion, hurtled past us. Today, they have gone so far ahead that catching up is only a political shibboleth, not a call for action. India yearns to belong to this bloc, but by all yardsticks we belong to the comity of nations to our West. Slowly descending into History's detritus.

It's fashionable, at least for Indians, to talk of India and China in the same breath. Or as the Asian Tigers. As Indians, there is no harm in wishing such development for a land whose name rings in our heart. A dispassionate view, however, is that India cannot catch up in our lifetime, certainly not with the way we do things. A change in mindset is the first requisite, not the last.

A couple of years of non-Hindu rate of growth, accompanied by gushing Western media reports, has befooled us into believing we are the Next Best Thing. To disabuse ourselves of this notion, all is needed is a small trip outside the country to see how much and how fast the world around us has changed, and then return to our sorry airports for a reality check.

A nation doesn't become a superpower because the media paints it so. A nation doesn't become a superpower because your GDP is better than the global average. A nation doesn't become a superpower because its middle class has turned affluent. On the contrary, even without the above factors, a nation can become a superpower, if its critical systems -- especially the ones that touch citizens' lives -- function like that of a superpower. How do you become a superpower if your farmers are killing themselves like flies, when half the nation is poor, where the female is not given her due despite the land's hoary traditions exalting her as a godhead, where your primary health and education is in a mess, where the cities slowly head towards implosion?

It is here that India fails miserably, terribly. From simple tasks like procuring any of the citizenship documentation -- a ration card, an elector's card, a passport -- to local council issues, be it road maintenance and expansion, hygienic water, India is a nation stuck in a Third World mentality, a cruel time warp. As more and more Indians may travel overseas and see how the rest of the world lives, and contrast it with their own condition, dissonance is inevitable.

So when you read reports that a provincial chief minister has paid Rs 150 million in advance tax (actual tax computation to come later), it shouldn't surprise you. Nor should you wonder how come, despite the billions spent in the time we have elected to rule ourselves, the nation has remained backward while its politicians have made tremendous advancement. Nor should you be surprised, that taking a cue from the apathetic ruling class is Joe Citizen himself.

Because you see, in the Indian context, democracy is synonymous with non-delivery. Politicians are the only professionals (if you agree it is the second oldest profession) who are bound neither by a professional code of ethics, nor by any performance guarantee. Our model of governance, based on the British Westminster Abbey template, may have suited us better when we were taking baby steps in self-governance after centuries of subjugation, but today, as the nation gets assertive and its people more demanding, it won't be a wrong idea to alter the system to suit the times.

The times, clearly, don't suit the system.

But can a 58-year-old nation change? Sometimes I am glad Bharati didn't live to see what we've made of the freedom he so died for.

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh