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A
Midnight Clear
Kimaya
Gokhale
As
I stand under the clear midnight sky I wonder, is
it really fifty-five years since 1947? It
doesn’t seem so at all. It seems like just
yesterday I heard Panditji’s speech,
“At
the stroke of midnight hour, when the world
sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A
moment comes which comes but rarely in history,
when we step out from the old to the new, then an
age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long
suppressed, finds utterance.”
Have
I been watching too much television or have things
really not changed since then?
There
are a lot more buildings outside my window. I see
big large roads and giant railway networks and
airplanes by the dozen. I also see a vast
government employing thousands working daily and
hourly to meet the needs of the citizens. But is
this enough? Surely we grow millions of tons of
food each year, enough theoretically to feed our
people many times a day, and yet I can see
starving people right in front of my house. If I
wander a little off the road, down some less
traveled track I can see the hunger in peoples’
eyes. Seems to me like we just about managed to
grow food but never quite gave as much thought to
how best to distribute all that we grow.
I
guess if that makes me feel unhappy I could always
take solace in the fact that there are a lot of
rich people than ever before. Its all about
liberalization, at first people thought that the
Government could do it all; employ them, feed
them, clothe them, pay them and so on, but back in
1991 we realized that was not quite the case.
Apparently not even the Government has that much
money. So now the only way that the Government can
make money is to allow private entrepreneurship to
grow and somehow sell all the stuff it has
`bought’. So now we live an `Age of
Disinvestment’. I shouldn’t be too surprised
if the employees of the companies the Government
wants to sell don’t take too kindly to being
sold. I wonder how we are going to get through
that.
I
suppose once the `disinvested’ employees are on
the open market they will do quite well. Take my
telephone repairman for instance; he is going to
be `disinvested’ soon. He works hard and is
pretty good at his work. Of course you have to
give him a `baksheesh’ at the end to make sure
that he is satisfied but its all this low
government salary; hardly enough to make ends
meet. He has so many things to balance, his kids
in school, his wife, his father in his village,
his sick mother in hospital and the family's
medical costs. I really don’t know how he could
possibly manage without the `baksheesh’. He once
told me that everyone took a cut, all the way to
the top. I didn’t believe him at the time, but
then Tehelka’s videos make me think highly of
his judgment now.
Don’t
get me wrong I am not approving corruption, and
unless something is done to stem it, it will
render the country dysfunctional, but you can’t
possibly expect me to deny his kids a good
education. They study in the village, the school
doesn’t have a roof, and the government employed
schoolteacher only turns up three days in a week.
The child should go to tuition otherwise or risk
failing the 10th standard exam. The
money I give goes directly for the child’s
textbooks. Honestly I can’t for the life of me
understand what the child gains by studying
textbooks. All those textbooks are written by city
people, there nothing there about farming, raising
cattle, finding water. I bet there is
absolutely nothing of value to a villager in those
textbooks but still if the child wants to learn I
don’t want to stop her/him.
I
think the child is probably better off than his
wife. I
am not saying he does it, but the statistics say
that spousal abuse is quite common among
low-income groups and I can say with certainty
that high-income spouses are not fantastically
better off either. I wonder if the child is a boy
or a girl, I do hope it is a girl. At least that
way the she will not have to pay school or college
fees. That is one area where things are quite
different from 50 years ago. We have women
politicians, police officers, armed forces
officers, shopkeepers, fruit-vendors, taxi-drivers
and just about everything else. Now if
we can just get the parliament to pass that
Women’s Reservation Bill, then we’d have 50
percent women in Parliament and that would be it.
In a nation of 1 billion, to have 500 million
people under-represented seems unwise.
Speaking
of reservations, the caste based reservation
policy has been quite successful. It has served as
focal point for lower caste political interests.
This in turn has brought about an unprecedented
increase in political awareness among the lower
castes. Where political awareness goes,
self-awareness cannot be far behind. So in some
sense the battle here has only just begun. There
are many who oppose this policy; they see it as
de-emphasizing merit and promoting unproductive
work ethic. I cannot disagree enough with these
people, I feel that unless one looks beyond the
interests of their own community, one cannot see
the merits of positive discrimination.
`Communal’
is a "bad" word in Indian English. Fifty-five years
ago it was used to split our country in half.
Today, though people aren’t physically running
across the country in opposite directions as they
were in 1947, their minds still are. I guess that
is a major improvement in some sense, but things
have gotten especially bad in the last few years.
Back in the 80s we saw some pretty horrible stuff
during the Sikh militancy, a lot of people ended
up dead then. Just when that was ebbing this thing
in Kashmir started up and then there was the mess
in Ayodhya and then there was that business with
the missionaries and it simply hasn’t let up
since. Frankly Godhra-Ahmedabad last year
doesn’t surprise me, I have seen a lot of hatred
in peoples’ minds, and it seems to be growing. I
don’t quite know what to do about it.
If
the hatred grows, terror will follow in its
footsteps. The Government must understand this,
because it is busy building a `National Security
Mechanism’ of some sort. Sure we have more
warplanes, warships, tanks, guns, cannons and
missiles then ever before, all that means
absolutely nothing unless each element works in
step with the other. Apparently they thought about
all this in the aftermath of that nasty business
in Kargil. After all that thinking they began
building all sorts of councils and secretariats
and multi-agency centers. I knew someone who died
in the Kargil War and ofcourse I am not
alone in this, but I really hope all this works as they
think it will.
Now
I am told that in spite of Kargil, Pakistan wants
to make nuclear war with us. Musharraf himself
has told me this on NDTV. I’d like to live in
peace next to them but frankly they aren’t
really giving us a lot of options here. I don’t
support the murder of millions and I know exactly
what will happen when we go to war with Pakistan
now, but I cannot speak for everyone else. This is
not like previous times, this time around everyone
has to be on board and everyone has to be ready.
The Americans and the Russians may have played
nuclear games for fifty years, but the Pakistanis
don’t have the stamina for even five years. Even
if we play the deterrence game with them, they can
always have their pals in the Jehad community go
around the deterrence regime. This has all the makings of a bad
situation and I don’t think the world really
cares.
Normally
I would have been happy to know that the world
doesn’t care about us. However after all this
liberalization, and globalization, and post-Cold
War-Global War on Terror, things are getting a
little uncomfortable. The old live-and-let-die
policy I had of dealing with the `World’s
Problems’ isn’t working anymore. The world has
become the ultimate capital reserve for us; it is
the ultimate “cash cow”. If we don’t take as
much as we can, the Chinese will definitely take
our share, if they don't Brazil will. All the major economic reforms rest
on the basic principle that we `fit in’ to the
world. So I think now there is a lot of rush to
find a place for us on the `World Table’.
The
thing that bothers me about this rush is the
possibility of making bad choices in a hurry.
There are a fairly large number of mistakes that
the `Developed World’ made: poor technology
choices that cost lives and caused pollution. We
have to have some way of making sure that they
don’t foist their mistakes on us. We must
protect our environment, and I am glad we have
people like Babasaheb Amte and Medhatai Patkar,
but we need more people like this.
I
am also worried about the impact of this
globalization rush on the national health care
system. We have worked pretty hard to establish a
functioning basic health care system. I accept it
is not perfect but at least it ensures that there
is some basic health care as opposed to none. It
would be a real shame to lose all this to some
foreign patent law.
It
would also help if motivated and well-meaning
people learned to respect the decision of the
Supreme Court. Making a spectacle of oneself
outside the court gates does not decrease the
judicial caseload and it does not get justice any
faster. After Independence we went to great length
to design a fair judicial process, but maybe its
time to focus specifically on the issue of speed
of procedure. A transition form `Justice Denied’
to `Justice Delayed’ is not much to be proud of.
I
think that Panditji knew all this when at that
late hour standing on floor of the constituent
assembly he said,
“The
ambition of the greatest man of our generation has
been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may
be beyond us but so long as there are tears and
suffering, so long our work will not be over. And
so we have to labor and to work, and work hard, to
give reality to our dreams.”
And now I suppose I know it too.
We have a lot of work to do, might as well get on
with it.
Not much left to say at this point but Jai
Hind.
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