God can't, but Man can by Sunanda K Datta-Ray 15 Aug 08 (http://dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?main_variable=EDITS&file_name=edit3%2Etxt&counter_img=3)
On the eve of independence, a much older cousin inscribed some words of wisdom in my autograph book. "You will be a free man in a free country very soon," he wrote. "So, build yourself and behave accordingly." That was on June 26, 1947. I was a bewildered little schoolboy with no idea of what Dominion Status meant; my cousin, an enthusiastic but obscure office worker, was as vague about the free India of his dreams as the joke about Field Marshal Cariappa announcing in his heavy British accent, "Aaj hum lok sab mufti ho gya!"
Looking back, I must confess that confusion deepened when I read Rabindranath Tagore's deathbed testimony, "The wheels of fate will some day compel the English to give up their Indian empire. But what kind of India will they leave behind, what stark misery? When the stream of their centuries' administration runs dry at last, what a waste of mud and filth they will leave behind!" Recalling the sparkle of Connaught Circus or the sylvan tranquillity of Calcutta's Maidan, it seemed that the mud and filth came only after we assumed charge of our own destiny.
Of course, this is a gross simplification. Viceregal Government neglected vast areas of Indian life. Industrialisation, without which there could be no prosperity, was discouraged. A request by Lord Mountbatten, then Supreme Commander of the South-East Asia Command, for large-scale parachute production in India was turned down because, he thought, of Britain's "desire to keep India as a market for British manufactured goods after the war". The "road of life" in Minoo Masani's delightful book, Our India (1940), showed a Frenchman striding along till he was nearly 60, a New Zealander waving his stick as he approached 70, but "the Indian is collapsing before he gets to the 30-year mark". Average longevity was 27.
Indians live longer and eat better now. Urbanisation has increased, agriculture improved, education is spreading, industrialisation making progress. There are more cars and telephones, and phenomenal mobile penetration. We are a nuclear power. But the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Index places India 126th out of 162 countries in terms of quality of life. Masani would not have been proud of this record had he still been with us.
It's neither here nor there that conditions were even worse before 1947. Colonialism would have been equally repugnant if British India had been a land flowing with milk and honey. That was poignantly highlighted when the future Edward VIII asked a nationalist leader, whose name I have forgotten, during his catastrophic 1927 tour whether India would be better off if the British left. "No sir," the Indian replied, "but we would have self-respect". Nothing can compensate for the loss of a nation's izzat.
It's izzat that brings to mind the calumny heaped on India and Indians by the boastful Winston Churchill because, tragically, we seem poised 61 years after independence to live up to some of his most vicious propaganda. Let's take Churchill's India Empire Society speech at London's Albert Hall on March 18, 1931, with his kinsman the Duke of Marlborough presiding. His venom was especially directed at Mahatma Gandhi, "the saint, the lawyer", surrounded by "rich Bombay merchants and millionaire millionaires, millionaires on sweated labour", who "stands for the substitution of Brahmin domination for British rule in India".
I will not repeat all the slander of that speech for it might cause fits of apoplexy among patriotic readers on a joyful anniversary. But Churchill's main barbs are worth bearing in mind, even at the cost of some pain. First, the caste bias of India's establishment. Second, the ease with which our politicians cite the great European liberals (John Stuart Mill and Jean Jacques Rousseau) while practising social and religious bigotry. Third, the disgruntlement of minority communities, including Muslims, Sikhs, Gurkhas and today's Dalits. Fourth, the threat to "the whole efficiency of the services", defence, administrative, medical, hygienic, judicial, railway, irrigation, public works and famine prevention. And finally, Churchill's belief that "the greatest ramp" by people out to make a fast buck, as Americans say, would follow independence. "Nepotism, back-scratching, graft and corruption in every form will be the handmaidens of a Brahmin domination".
His doleful conclusion that independent India would "fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages" would amuse or outrage people today. But there is no denying that the persistence, in however minimal form, so long after independence of many of the abuses he listed would have grieved innocents like my long dead cousin. Some of these evils are colonial legacies. Some existed then but have been aggravated since. Some we have created ourselves.
Tarzie Vittachi, the Sinhalese journalist, asked Jawaharlal Nehru before he died what was his greatest failure. Nehru reflected and replied, "I failed to change this administration. It is still a colonial administration". Actually, it's far worse. Colonial administrators were paternalistic, today's are often power-brokers obsessed with rank, witness the lights and flags on their cars or the refusal to vacate unauthorised official accommodation. Small things like the uncaring pomposity of bureaucrats, the sugary criminality of many politicians, the pandemonium that passes for parliamentary debate, farmers' suicides or the revelation that a woman is raped every 27 minutes erode the fabric of civilised life as devastatingly as terrorist attacks.
It's not a question of this party or that. It's a question of society in decline. "The whole Government machinery is corrupt," Justices BN Agrawal and GS Singhvi of the Supreme Court declared recently. "We will lay down the law, but who will implement it." There was no questionmark at the end. It was a bleak statement of fact.
But though most of my generation may have failed to live up to the demands of independence, as urged by those fading lines in my autograph book, judicial pessimism cannot be endorsed. Freedom was a novel prospect in 1947 when no one quite knew what needed doing. There is no question of ignorance, ambivalence or uncertainty six decades later. Even if "God cannot save this country" as Justices Agrawal and Singhvi argued, Man can. To claim otherwise would be to denounce India's youth on an Independence day that Abhinav Bindra has invested with faith and hope for the future.
-- sunandadr@yahoo.co.in
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