The curtains may have come down on year 2010 but it has not done any good to my sense of anguish and hopelessness as a citizen of India – India that apparently has become corrupt to the core. Year 2011 may have dawned but it has not helped my new found belief that my country has lost its conscience completely.
Wait. It has nothing to do with the rise of the Rajas and the Radias. They and their ilk are least responsible for such a breakdown of my belief for they are not a new phenomenon in my country which bore Bofors long back when such champions were not even players. My country has long been hauled by hawala. This country has not spared even the dead soldiers and cattle by delivering scams on coffin and fodder.
If you think any of these new champions created history in 2010, you are crediting them with something they don’t deserve. They just carried further the legacies laid down long back. They all have predecessors and there have always been precedents.
As early as in 1974, we witnessed the Maruti scandal when Sanjay Gandhi was awarded the licence to produce Maruti cars even before the company was formed. Sharad Pawar only followed in the footprints of Kamal Nath who ate much more sugar in 1994 than him. Telgi, Harshad Mehta, Chandraswamy, the securities scam in 1992, the UTI scam in 2000, the mutual fund scam in 2001, the IPO scam in 2006… there is an endless list. You name it, Indians have it.
So, what/who is responsible for the pessimist and loser that I am sounding like today? Before I confide that in you, let me concisely share with you a faint and yet ‘ingrained in my mind’ memory of this mythological fable I read as a kid in 4th standard. “Once Lord Rama, after taking a dip in a river, came out and took out his bow from the soil on the bank of the river where he had stuck it, he found an insect stuck with the corner edge of his bow. On realising he had injured it badly, Rama pleaded guilty and asked the insect why it didn’t raise a voice rather than suffering so much pain all along when he was taking bath. A pained insect told Rama, “Lord, when the snakes and bigger insects attacked me, I would pray in your name and always remained unharmed. Today, when you yourself hit me, I didn’t know whom to pray to.”
It was simply the shattering of one’s faith that a saviour was there, no matter who. I am pained not by the Rajas and the Radias but by the Barkhas and the Sanghvis, even more by Manmohan Singh and most by the Balakrishnans. As a citizen, I have started to believe I cannot look up to anybody, not even the prime minister of my country. Not even the Supreme Court. Sadly enough, not even the media. I am disgusted, for the institutions of credibility have become unaccountable to the point from where resurrecting the system will need no less than a renaissance – may be in a form even more radical than the one we saw in Europe.
All my saviours have failed me. A prime minister who looked to be the knight with the most shining armor has turned out to be the mutest spectator at the helm of the filthiest corrupt government post independence. A chief justice who (going by media reports) failed to rake up or even properly report a central minister’s misdeeds, of which he had complete knowledge. Media stalwarts I grew up idolising, taking and giving undue favours and bringing disgrace to the fourth pillar of democracy.
As a citizen, when I look around for that one institution of governance in my country which has managed to keep its integrity intact, I fail to find any. I don’t know if this is the worst form of ‘institutionalisation of evil’ or the nadir is yet to come.
They say the only thing needed for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing. In my country, the good Man(mohan) has maintained a stoic silence of a degree that would have given an inferiority complex to even Zeno, the one who propounded stoicism.
As a school kid I had to write an essay "If I were the prime minister". I believe most readers would have been tasked with a similar exercise at some point at school. Most of us would have been too young to realise what governance meant, but didn't we all stumble upon our respective visions of good governance then? Population, poverty, transport, communication and yes, not to forget, corruption, were all talked about in such school essays. The feeling then used to be of helplessness as we saw that reality did not match up to such pictures of our young minds. I had wished I was the PM then, for real!
Nothing has changed today. I am still prone to such wishes. Only, the object of my wish is no longer the prime ministerial chair. I wish I were the chief justice, central vigilance commissioner or even the group editor of a news channel - any position that would help me effect change. The malaise runs so deep down, I also wish I were in place of the judges who send the Binayak Sens to jail and free Manu Sharmas.
But the fact remains that I am only an ordinary citizen of India. I wish they at least respected my status, that of an ordinary citizen and allowed me to exercise my citizenship. I wish they didn’t make a fool of me.
