India that is a banana republic
I am told that Robert Vadra,
son-in-law of the country’s ‘first family’ has called India a banana republic
and its common people (áam aadmi’) ‘mango people’ in jest. When the whole
country is worked up over the way he was “handling’ his affairs, this guy could
boast and jest is a sign of confidence reaching the level of arrogance. And why
not? He is a VVIP who is registered all over the country’s airports as one who
needs no security check. He is no ’aam aadmi’’ going by the size of the
reputation, mango, though the king of fruits, is too small to define his ego,
he should be called the ‘jackfruit chap’.
I for one, would once again be on
Mr.Vadra’s side in the fresh controversy. (By the way, was he not a Vadera when
he married Priyankaji? I cannot find any reason for changing the spelling of
the surname unlike in his grandfather-in-law’s case. The clever Parsi lad had high-jacked
not only a Banya surname but also the family name of the Father of the Nation
in one go! It has to be numerology in Vadra’s case. And the divine numbers are
working overtime to boost his wealth and well-being indeed.) Did he not tell
the truth when he called this country a banana republic? Honest to God, yes. I
feel just as hurt when former Singapore Prime Minister called India a ‘soft state’
for equally good reasons though. But truth shall prevail – Sathyameaeva
Jayathae! This country is indeed a banana republic of sorts, though claims in
official records as a Sovereign Democratic Republic.
Though unrelated, I remember a
primary school teacher in Malayalam write late Karoor Neelakadapillai’s story,
‘ädbudhamanushyan’ or ‘Miracle Man’. The poor teacher goes to a fair ground and
is attracted by a signboard announcing a ‘Miracle Man’ inside an enclosure. He byuys
the entry pass with the only coin he had in his pocket, that too confiscated
from a student who had ignored the ban on bringing cash into the classroom,
with the only intention of informing the students all about the strange sight.
What he sees inside was an ordinary mortal, idling his time. The teacher
explodes in anger over being cheated; asking the fellow what was special about him.
Theman evades the question and says quietly that he would return the money with
a small increment, provided the teacher manned the position when he was having
his lunch. Trapped, the teacher accepts this offer and takes the role. That was
when the school manager and headmaster arrive to see the ‘miracle man’ and
seeing the present incumbent they seethe in anger. The Manager threatens to sack the teacher for undignified behaviour,
and asks him to explain what was miraculous about him anyway? Cornered, beaten,
and dejected, our teacher then shoots off a number of unpleasant truths about
his service conditions and remuneration to the manager, and asks whether it was
not sheer miracle that he survives, and
supports a family of five?
Similarly, I am going to examine
our country’s politics, economics and governance to disprove its claim to the status of a ’mature democracy’
and a Sovereign Republic when Mr.Vadra’s in-laws have been guiding the affairs
of it. I bet you will agree with Mr.Vadra and me that India that is Bharat is
indeed a banana republic.
By the logic of events leading
our Independence, India that is Bharat should have been guided by Gandhian
principles: Peace, non-violence, non-exploitative society, simple living and
high thinking. Ha-ha, I feel like the blind grandma at her son’s funeral asking
the grandson whether she was actually at the grave of her late son. That was
when the priest spoke kindly of the dead man during the graveside service. He
was actually a drunkard and a rogue. So is the case with our country. An old
man in our village put the situation graphically for me. Had he been alive,
Gandhiji would have died a miserable death akin to that of a salt stone at the
seashore dissolving in wave after wave lashing at it.
Here is the scenario as it was
enacted during the last phase of his mission: Nehru on Gandhi – from Freedom at Midnight (Larry Collins & Dominique
Lapierre): Nehru contemptuously told Mountbatten in his first meeting with the
new Viceroy about Gandhiji’s work in riot-affected Bihar and Noakhali that “the
man was going around with ointment trying to heal one sore spot after another
on the body of India instead of diagnosing the cause of the eruption of the
sores and participating in the treatment as a whole”. He was talking about the
communal divide and Gandhiji’s objection to the partition! This lead the
Viceroy to focus on partition as a ‘solution’. Lester Pierson, Prime Minister
of Canada (1962-68) and winner of Nobel Peace Prize, mentions in his memoirs
how shocked he was when Nehru spoke of his mentor Gandhiji as “an awful old
hypocrite”. Great start it was for a Gandhian Ram Rajya!
Nehru the Prime Minister (he was
the External Affairs Minister, and also in charge of most important portfolios)
surrendered the country’s British-inherited extraterritorial rights in 1954.
Later we gave back the strategic Haji Pir after the 1965 war! Indira Gandhi had this country foolishly
return the territorial gains of the 1971 war and the 90000 Pak PoWs without
securing any tangible diplomatic reciprocity. Now after all the atrocities
being committed by Pak-sponsored-trained terrorists peaceniks in India are
recommending the unilateral transfer of Siachen Glacier to the attacker of
Kargil. Under the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 India agreed to give 80.52% share
of the 6-river Indus system with Pakistan, the downstream state. That is more
than what the United States agreed to give Mexico under the 1944 US-Mexico
Water Treaty. According to the 2030 Water Resources Group, India confronts a
52% deficit! In the 1996 Ganges Treaty India offered an almost equal division
of down-stream Ganges flow, guaranteeing minimum cross-border flows in the dry
season, which is a new principle in international water law. It may be
remembered that tiny Bangladesh has an average 8252 cubic meters of annual per
capita water availability while India has just 1560 cubic meters. Now Manmohan
Singh government is anxious about a Teesta river treaty to Bangladesh’s
advantage. It may be remembered that India is most dependent on Himalayan-Tibetan
water for a dozen important rivers flowing down, getting almost a third of the
yearly water supplies of 1911 cubic kilometres from Tibet. But China now
challenges India’s interests with its extensive upstream infrastructure.
Have a look at our record in the
field of diplomacy. No less a person than Nehru, the ‘international leader’ had
designed our foreign policy. Panchsheel signatory China first attacked India
and snatched away a large swathe of land. They now demand return of Arunachal
Pradesh because Tawangs had paid tether to the Ming Emperors! We do not have
anybody in our neighbourhood as a close ally or friend, period. Our External
Affairs Minister had just made a trip to Pakistan as a confidence-building
measure, as he reached back, they confidently raised the Kashmir issue in the
UN Security Council. That is rotten egg on the face of our great diplomacy.
There are no two opinions
regarding when the country was on a fast down-slide in every field. Corruption,
institutional emasculation, moral decadence, poor governance, everything peaked
since 1970. She played politics with everything. Following her sad demise, her
son who had absolutely no political education or administrative experience
succeeded her as PM. Power inflated this young man’s ego and he fumbled along
to destroy the country, and on to his own assassination at the hands of a
militant group he had our army train and arm.
PV Narasinha Rao government was
perhaps whiff of fresh air in the matter of democratic succession. Though now
credited with “opening up” the economy (people forget that one year after the
opening up, his party which lost some by-elections had him return to the old
ways mostly) the PV government set up a paradigm of misgovernance by giving the
country its first major scams – the bank scam, the urea scam, the sugar import
scandal and the telecom scandal. It was during this infamous chapter of Indian
history that P.Chidambaram, the Present Finance Minister had his Rs.2.5lakh
worth shares in Fair Growth go up to Rs.75 lakhs within 8 months thanks to
Harshad Mehta’s manipulation. The present Prime Minister, and his party, who
selectively remember the period’s economic reforms and achievements, forget his
preposterous comment after going into hiding for about a week after Bank Scam
that it was on account of “systemic” defects.
1993 December 6 – Motilal Vora,
Governor of UP promulgated an ordinance repealing the Anti-copying Act enacted
by the former BJP government. With 16000 cases pending against students who
copied in the annual exams of 1993 April, Congress party thought they would get
votes. When BJP didn’t come back to power, The Times of India reported the Act
as a cause, and editorially condemned the “perverse opposition by students and
teachers” to the Anti-copying Act.
It was during the regime of
scholarly PV that Soniaji complained of the CBI assiduously pursuing the Bofors
Case, and the Minister in charge of the department of Personnel, which ruled
the CBI was changed, and soon Octavio Qattrocchi fled the country. Does anybody
with even a five-year-old chimpanzee’s brain wonder how an employee of Snamprojetti in the business of power-fertilizer projects
could get a 3 per cent commission on the Indian Army’s purchase of Bofors
Hovitzers from Sweden? That Qattrocchi family was friends of Prime Minister Rajiv’s
and they had holidays together was no secret. That was the beginning of big
money corruption which now has gone up from Rs.64Cr to Lakhs of crores. In 2006
ONGC Videsh Limited acquired Block No.128 in South China Sea and spent $50
billion exploring oil till 2011 and assessed the prospects of finding oil "limited”, and took a “technical” decision to end further investment or abandon
it/return to Vietnam! I wonder whether that much money was actually spent or
just accounted for !.
Half of the 71292 Cr spent on
Andhra Pradesh by the late Christian Chief Minister YSR’s Jalayagnam irrigation
project is feared swindled. Documents obtained under the RTI Act show the
irregularities that were committed range from violation of the common tender
document to illegally made excessive payments for the works done and
fraudulently claimed to have been done. Irrigation projects in Andhra Pradesh
involving a combined outlay of Rs 1.8 trillion is reported to have come under
the scrutiny of the Prime Minister’s Office following corruption charges. The
PMO has, reportedly, sought details of the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC)
contracts awarded by the AP irrigation department, spelling potential trouble
for the projects undertaken in the past five years. But then the PMO is
answerable to unheard of levels of scams and corruption! In Maharashtra,
another congress-ruled State, where an equally impressive line-up of irrigation
projects have swallowed some Rs.70000. Corruption in India comes in many more forms.
NREGA wages are paid to beneficiaries only after a cut. Fictitious
beneficiaries are enrolled as below poverty line and paid. Roads and sanitation
are not built although they are paid for or built poorly. The pay-out proposed in this year’s budget
proposals is 31000Cr, it may be remembered.
On November 8, 1993, the Times of India
reported that the CBI had implicated
Congress MLA Ms.Santokben S.Jadeja, and Mr.Kandhal S.Jadeja in gun running for
the ISI, connections with Punjab-terrorists (associated with the dreaded
Lalsingh alias Manjit Singh and ISI agents). In July 1992 Rs.2 Crores worth
arms were seized in Ahmedabad (Paldi and Juhapur). That is Gujrat Congress
party’s brand of patriotism.
Do you remember the Mandal
Commission Report and Nani Pakhiwala’s fervent plea before the Supreme Court of
India not to divide the country once again on caste-lines? The author of the
Mandal Report recommending reservation for the OBC, Bindeswari Prasad Mandal
the scion of 5000 acre land lord was the only student who had his personal
servants in the Patna University College Hostel, eminent historian RC Sharma, a
contemporary, remembered. Mandal was a Yadav from Madhepura (Rome hai Pope ka,
Madhepura hai, Gope (cowerds or yadavs) ka !)
Secularism is a great concern for
most political parties seeking power in India. But it is some kinf of
“minoritysm” that is played out. Which country, which democracy, will have a PM
make “cringe-inducing, dhimmi-like remark” that the minorities of the country
have the first charge of nation’s resources? Yes, this is the political culture
of vote-banks, of course. Bihar has an
Arabic University established by Laloo dispensation and for 13 years no student
was admitted to it, I read sometime in 2005 or so. Later Laoo offered an Urdu
Directorate to the Muslim voters! In the context of the entire liberal Left and
secular people bending over backwards to be nice to Muslim fanaticism, even to
the point of condoning the sporadic bomb blasts all over the country, someone
had said that compared with the murderous Muslim fundamentalists, the Hindu
extremists in India offered the liberal secularists and leftists a “lover cost
of dissent” as it costs them much less
in terms of personal danger to life, limb
and property to cock a snook at the so-called violent Hindu than at the Muslim
terrorist!
For all that you see, the Sangh
Parivar tries to use the glorious past of India and fuse tradition with
modernity to reinvigorate a society that has lost its moorings thanks to the
long foreign rule and the British education. It is a fact that in spite of the
alien rule and a democracy guided by communist fellow-travellers, the ideal of a
ruler guided by ‘dharma’ exists in the Indian imagination even today, because
of the astonishing continuity of Indian civilization. A majority of the people
of the Indian sub-continent are yet deeply religious, and it is not
inappropriate to turn to tradition to seek that moral core that can shape our
polity and civic life. As Gurucharan Das said, “Fusing tradition with modernity
could help restore the moral core in a meaningful way in support of the modern
rule of law to re-invigorate India’s democracy.” But The Sangh Parivar is the
most reviled and despised group in the country. The Left liberal pooh-pooh
patriotism as a base sentiment.
Unfortunately, it is generally
believed now that the core values of the present Indian Civil Service happen to
be self-aggrandisement, non-accountability, turf-protection, and a divine right
to rule over others. They seem to have lost integrity as well as the
sensitivity to discharge their functions. There is no system of
performance-monitoring or efficiency-linked compensation as in the private
service. Matters have worsened to a situation having a
politician-businessmen-bureaucracy-criminals nexus firmly in place. The
credibility and legitimacy of the Union government has fallen to unprecedented
levels thanks to the governance deficit and disconnect between people and
politicians in power.
Air India, the so-called national
carrier has over Rs.40000Cr debt. Knowledgeable people say that this money is
enough to start 80 airlines! Overstaffed – 475 employees per air craft (IndiGo
has just 70!) On an average 30% of AI planes are grounded on account of slack
maintenance. Air India’s Cost per Available Seat Km (CASK) is probably the
highest in the world. CASK is the industry benchmark globally for measuring
airline efficiency. This sort of colossal mis-management of scarce national
resources through-out the entire public sector barring a few, is
allowed/encouraged when according to recently published poverty metrics of the
National Planning Commission show that 29.8% people of 360 million Indians out
of the 1.2 billion population are below the poverty line.
Everywhere in the world, the laws
of economics drive the geography of business activity, more and more in the
difficult times. Not so in India, this banana republic. Politics, and political
advantages to the Congress party alone, decides the course of economic policies
of the Government of India. It is not just the Congress, but take the case of
the CPI (M) which ruled West Bengal for continuous 34 years and Kerala every alternate 5 years besides
terms in Manipur where they have cultivated and exploited a grievance-guilt syndrome and nurtured a
romance of poverty and suffering to sustain it, to come in power. In West
Bengal Jyoti Basu’s 23 year-old rule saw destruction of education, collapse of
infrastructure, de-industrialisation and an exodus of professionals. MA Baby,
Kerala’s Minister for Education during the previous government, had chosen to
set the education bar lower and lower offering perhaps an unintentionally
terrifying example of the spread of lowest-common-denominator culture and
education with high passing percentages. The CPM-led government was rewarding
students who are increasingly unwilling to devote time and attention to reading
books and learning with educational qualifications and freeing a salary-obsessed
and politically active teaching community from teaching. The CPM has the
largest Student-Teacher’s Unions in the State.
GARIBI HATAVO: Why was not poverty banished from India? Everybody
knows that poverty can be removed by home-grown methods by our domestic
reformers groping their way towards more democracy, cleaner and more
accountable government, and free markets. It has not happened in India, the
banana republic. Most of Congress Party promises to people have been akin to
the Bernard Madoff Ponzi schemes: remember, Madoff’s pedigree was great too;
and that indeed was the reason for his success. In India too, pedigree is what
decides leadership. Who become national leaders? The ability to connect with a
broad swath of people—across political, religious and other lines – is an
attribute a national leader must have. Does the Congress president have these?
What about her son? Sonia G, after all, is the idol of only a crawling swarm of
small souls like PC, Salman Khurshid, Manish Tiwari and the likes.
Democracy presumes that all are
created equal; experience proves we are indeed not. We talk about a level
playing field because that is perhaps the least we can do in the face of
nature's injustice. Some people are born strong or stretchy, or with luck that
takes them places, positions them in exalted perches. Some of us have inflated
egos, or else with a permanent inferiority complex. Robert Vadras of our world
have everything going for them. The “cordial hypocrisy” of media enterprise
will see him soon let off the hook. As it is, by sheer force of habit, aided by
massive propaganda, we Indians have been posthumously adding a few inches each
year to the height of leaders from the Nehru family. Nehru, Indira, and Rajiv
were overrated in their prime and bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now. We
also forget and forgive fast. Someone from that family is waiting in the wings
to assume “higher responsibilities” in Government.
Satyameva Jayathae:
Mahatma Gandhi would be turning in his grave as the Indian rulers hold forth
with blatant lies, terminological inexactitudes, half-truths and damned lies, every
day. So tell me, my friends, aren’t
Vadra and I right about this country being a banana republic? Where else you
can find an apparently clean Prime Minister governing a ministry which the CAG
insists had doled out largesses to private corporate bodies floated in some
cases only to trade in coal, huge blocks of coal for mining to cause revenue
losses amounting to nearly Rs.2lakh crores? Where else in this world a cabinet
minister over-rules the PM and ignores practices and rules to give away
communication spectrum licences to his favourites, some of them in real
estate business etc. to make money for himself, his party, and for those who chose to look the other way, and eventually to
cause the Exchequer over a lakh and quarter crores of rupees, and the PM
defends him till he had to be thrown out of the Cabinet and put in prison? Where
else in any decent system of democracy with a responsible government even the
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the Judges of the Supreme and High Courts happen
to be admittedly, not above board? Where else in the whole wide world a foreign woman with
apparently minimum education and practically no communications kills apart from
reading speeches scripted for her, ruling a country of 1.2 billion people using
other people as cats paws, simply because she was the wife of a former Prime
Minister, and he belonged to a dynastic family in a curiously democratic
polity?
And what do we do about it? I remember reading
that Gandhiji said once that if all Indians spat in unison, we could form a
puddle large enough to drown 300000 Englishmen who ruled us. Something like
that should be tried to drown the ruling elite of this banana republic.
