The Year Hope Died

Fifty-one is an auspicious number for Hindus, but the 51st year of India's Independence has been the nation's darkest hour. Thirty years ago when I became a journalist, I entertained no doubts about India's future. Our political system commanded an awesome legitimacy. Despite the '62 war with China, India was very much a leader of the non-aligned world. The economy was being racked by the second of two terrible droughts, but the Green Revolution was around the corner. Our industrial strategy had not prevented a devaluation of the rupee but it endowed India with a heavy industrial base that was the envy of others. In short, there was much that was wrong and needed to be fixed, but the Nehruvian vision for India was alive and well. We had something to fight for, and something to look forward to. Indians, one American scholar remarked, had a post-dated image of themselves. They could afford to have one because they entertained no doubts about where they and their country were headed.

The intervening decades have seen this image disintegrate and the vision of future greatness fade away. The political system has been captured by criminals. The Rule of Law has all but vanished. The courts have a backlog of more than a million cases. A harassed police has begun to shoot criminals instead of arresting them. Corruption pervades everything. Nations less fortunate have prospered while we have remained poor. The poverty is not of income alone but of aspiration. Our cities are the filthiest and most congested in the world. The Princes, or the British, built the only buildings we can be proud of. Our shanty towns rival those of Africa. Our quality of life is among the poorest in the world. These do not need money to fix; they need pride. Worst of all, while other countries have planned their growth strategies around the creation of employment, we have preferred to turn a blind eye to unemployment. We have almost 40 million job-seekers young men and women with degrees but without hope.

Is this only my personal angst? I wish that had been the case, but the sentiment seems universal. On an airplane packed with nris on their annual pilgrimage to India, an Australian friend heard one of them confide to another, "I hate India. I only come back to see the family". Anyone who has sat through an nri dinner in New York and heard the guests telling each other how lucky they are to have got out, will know that this is not an isolated case. How many other countries can claim the privilege of being regularly denigrated by their most pampered children?

At home the fading of a vision and the loss of hope has made us turn on each other like dogs in a leaderless pack. Today the sole remaining goal for most Indians is to safeguard their and their families' future at the expense of others. Greed, corruption and ostentation have crossed all sane frontiers. At the other end of the spectrum, all the agitation for secession, for separate statehood, for autonomous development regions, has been led by students and ex-students who see no other way of carving a niche for themselves in society except through the politics of violence.

Far more insidious is the proliferating demand for reservations. For behind the pious rhetoric of redress their aim is to create enclaves of privilege at the expense of merit. Beginning with the backward classes, reservation fever has swept through society like fire through a pine forest. Muslims, the backward, and now women are demanding their piece of the cake.

The only response to these challenges open to a criminalised state are violence against the one and crass appeasement of the other. Both have weakened, instead of strengthening, the nation state. Hope revived for a few brief years after 1991's economic reforms. For the first time in decades the country had a goal to end economic autarchy and integrate itself with the world economy. The pace of growth quickened to 7.5 per cent; the rate of job creation doubled, and capital raised by the private sector from the share markets increased by five times. For three brief years, every one who came out of college was able to secure a job.

BUT it was a false dawn. The prime minister who made this possible lacked the courage of his convictions and the country's corrupt political elite rose as one to tear him to pieces when he unwisely sanctioned an inquiry into the sources of its funds. The darkness that followed was more impenetrable than ever. The last year of the Rao government and the years that followed saw an unprecedented collapse of executive power. A bureaucracy that had long been accountable to no one simply stopped functioning and chose to concentrate on blocking all social and economic change. In desperation the public went to the courts for redress. And that started an encroachment by the judiciary on the executive, which has yet to end. Hope flickered faintly when the bjp came to power, for it was new to power and could disavow the past. But the party has proved as bereft of ideas and shredded by internal contradictions as its predecessors. Its one decisive action Pokhran tests was undertaken without a strategy for minimising its political fallout. For eight months it allowed the economy to slide into recession making wild forecasts of imminent recovery, and then adopted the only strategy for recovery pump priming demand via infrastructure investment that will hasten the slide into a foreign exchange crisis.

The Indian nation touched rock bottom four weeks ago when the courts and the bureaucracy combined to attack its last line of defence, the armed forces. But to the elite in Delhi, the conflict is just another diversion: 'Are you for or against Bhagwat', I am asked. 'Are you for or against Kalkat'. When there is no vision for the nation left, everything becomes a diversion.