Issue 28 Vol II, November 30, 2006

E D I T O R I A L

Between Hope and Despair

THE United Progressive Alliance government in India has crossed its half way mark and at present there is no threat to its continuation regardless of its vulnerability. Lead by an economist Dr Manmohan Singh and guided by Congress President Sonia Gandhi, its theme song has been reforms. It boasts of a respectable growth rate of over 8 per cent and a booming stock market. It also pats itself for record foreign direct investment and a happy foreign exchange reserve. Foreign trade is in good shape. Many world leaders have visited India and patted the government for its accomplishments. There is an effort to mend fences with neighbours and bring peace. There has been abundance of self applaud too.

Sadly the reforms have been confined to the economic sector; privatisation and disinvestment. Sale of government’s silver ware to greedy private sharks is considered as raison d’e-tre of reforms. It has been entirely forgotten that India has a great appetite for reforms. We fondly adorn those social and religious reformers of 19th and 20th centuries who helped us fight social injustice and criminal caste discrimination. May it be sati system or widow remarriage or untouchability; these daring reformers who helped us build modern minds through education are part of our folklore. Or those who launched the great Bhakti movement and helped awaken the spirit of India. Indians have a romantic association and revolutionary urge for reforms. Despite long period of slavery and denial of justice, Indian society has not been static or stagnant.

The government in its zeal to ape the western models of development particularly since 1991 has forgotten the magnificent chapters of reform in social and education sectors. Even removal of brutal untouchability and caste system has met just lips service. Electoral politics where castes count a lot has provided new blood to the caste partitions. Look how Indians, particularly the workers and farmers and other lower classes face the corrupt and blunt edge of the government functionaries; politicians, the babus and the big officers. How brutal and fraudulent are our police which profitably have been used as a political tool by our self serving rulers for the last 59 years of our independent existence.

Who really owns India? The rich, the political class, the babus and their henchmen who rule the roost or the farmers and workers and common people? Does India belong to them in the same manner as it does to the upper creamy crust?

The ideals set before the current leadership across the political spectrum is of big shopping plazas, five star malls and hotels, four or six lane express highways, modern airports as work of art and fast moving trains with plush stations. But there is no space for cycle rickshaws, pedestrians and millions of cyclists on these roads. We just wish away those millions who barely get their full meals. The farmers who commit suicides while feeding and clothing the country are a subject for abhorrence. Our upper and middle classes yearn for state of the art hospitals, schools and cricket stadiums and look the other way when bastis are demolished and burnt on the orders of high and mighty. It is all good. The Indian upper and middle class and its masters have a right to ask for much more. How about those marginalised people?

But India does not belong to these plundering and consuming classes alone. Or does it?  Has the Super Power of 2020 in its  national capital plan for  Delhi  any place for half a million rickshaw pullers, and another half a million auto rickshaw drivers, vendors of all sorts and  street hawkers and  those who pedal their way on cycles? Those non polluting classes otherwise. Visit any railways station in the country and meet these classes dot the platforms.

One wonders when Sonia Gandhi’s aam adami shall find his or her place in the scheme of those growth figures or on the pages of five year plans. This can happen when we stop our business of pity, the deceptive self purification and recogonise the rightful claims of the common people.

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