INDIA: BEYOND REDEMPTION?

That may not be the case, but at times, you tend to think like this when you really visit an India away from the metro India. And you don’t need to chart out the hinterlands to be witness to the fragility of the concept called India envisioned 65 years ago.

Just travel some kilometers from the outskirts of any sprawling metro city, be it Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore or any metro city of your choice, you can see the tentacles of lawlessness getting wider.

You’ll see police stations where you would find it is almost impossible to be heard sanely; where you would try hard and weigh all before entering its premises.

You’ll find government offices where senior and high-level bureaucrats would behave like they are the kings, the elite brass appointed to rule over you. Accessibility to them becomes like a prized commodity and you end up paying the convenience fee to the minions of the kings to have the access; to have your voice heard; all in exchange of some empty words and not even hollow promises.

You’ll encounter masses of lower-wrung functionaries in the government offices and would get frustrated (irritated) to find people looking just like you and me behaving like lesser crooks ready to make larger than life holes in your pocket.

You’ll see more students out of schools than in the campus in the government run educational institutions. You’ll encounter more or less similar situation in many private higher education institutions. Exceptions are a realized rarity.

You will find hospitals equaling the dirt and pollution of a busy station of the Indian Railways. You would need to sweat it out to find a patient coming there with a reason other than financial compulsions. You would easily find scores of them there being castigated by the doctors and the hospital staff who are supposed to heal them.

You’ll become witness to the breach of law in the courts that are supposed to preserve and perpetuate the rule of law.

Yes, you’ll see some bright spots out of all this gloom and looming doom. Yes, it is like gloom and the looming doom. Writing this is not pessimism. It is looking at the India of the day with an objective perspective when what you see and witness most of the time is the stories of ultimate human rot of the system where the people supposed to steer a developing nation out of poverty and underdevelopment, at every level of its administration, polity and policy, are soaked in corruption and shameless denial.

Where the country’s prime minister, in his response to the charges of corruption and financial bungling, promotes a corruption tainted minister and demotes an honest minister whose integrity confronted India’s biggest business house.

Where the country’s most powerful political family, that uses the surname of the father of the nation and has tried to rule the country since the independence is facing the charges that would shame the Mahatma.

Where the corruption taint is having the same hue on every political creature, be it at the Union level or in the states; be it the government or the opposition. The bureaucracy and the administrative coterie either follow them or add to their corrupt practices.

Where the activists of the country fight more among themselves than with the system; where the activists fight more for their selfish agendas than their concern for the main subject of the democracy, the voter like you and me.

This is my world view of the country India, based on my travels, travails and observations to the parts of the country I have been and I can claim it’s been pretty wide and I can claim I am a keen observer.

I felt heavy while writing this and would certainly like to see it change during more of my travels and observations.

I wrote of bright spots above and that is based on the observations that told me of the people like you and me, who, though not speaking, are observing all this; they are worried for their future, for security of their families, for days of their generations to come, and they are coming to know the rot-points in the system.

Yes, they are not speaking yet but burdened masses have spoken always, the history tells us.

Yes, it is the matter of time when it happens and the matter of swing over the issues of obstinacy of the people running the system now and the obduracy of the subjects of the system being governed by it.

That is what made me put a question mark to the title and deliberating over it and coming to it was really a soothing thread in the overall thought process.

Yes, India of the day looks beyond redemption but the redemption is bound to come. 

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com