Nothing is more excruciating than waiting for democracy or economy to flourish on an empty stomach. In more than 50 years of Independence and after executing nine 5-year-plans, India is still a "developing" country. That there are rampant unaccounted starvation deaths in India needs no corroborating evidence. India boasts of the largest amount of people living below the poverty line and about 35% of Indians are illiterate even when the government deems anybody “literate” as long as one can write his/her name in his/her mother-tongue. Digging into the roots of these problems, we find that two of the four pillars of democracy have failed completely in taking the nation forward. Let us take a quick look at them:
Legislative: Democracy is a leveling doctrine and the standards of leaders that people of a country elect are only as good as that of the people who elect them. Good, as long as people who vote have sound judgment and discretion. But Alas! Representative democracy for 50 years in India has only given rise to caste and vote-bank politics. "Honest politician" has become an oxymoron in the Indian political context. Far and few are examples of elections won on promises of development and almost non-existent are politicians who are ready to risk their “careers” talking about long-term goals and reforms instead of sops.
The idea of an average Indian politician is to keep his vote-bank in the “constantly expecting” mode using the dangling carrot approach. Politicians know only too well that the middle or the upper-middle-class in India hardly turn out to vote. Assuming a politician eradicates poverty in his constituency and educates all its denizens, he would be facing a vote crunch, just because the educated and the not-so-poor wouldn’t turn out to vote and people left out of the developmental wave would be anti-incumbent! It is a vicious circle that we have spun ourselves into.
Executive: To say that the executive machinery has crumbled would be an understatement. No department of the government is free from corruption and no citizen of India would have been spared embarrassing moments of greasing an officer’s palms. Agreed that even western countries have corruption, but at least they have ensured that infrastructure facilities are devoid of it. The situation is just otherwise here.
Very few radical changes have been pressed forward by India ever since the British left. CAS which was supposed to have revolutionized satellite-TV viewing failed to take off properly. VAT implementation is still in crossroads with several states playing truant. The RTI bill has finally been passed after several years while the situation actually demands a “Duty To Publish” bill which would make mandatory at least all civic bodies to voluntarily disclose and make publicly available their incomes and expenditures. The executive still languishes with the outdated aristocracy and the hand-in-glove politicians connive with the “babus”. Taxation is still archaic, appallingly, India, even today, does not recognize Intellectual Property rights, the Indian penal code needs a close re-look and several constitutional amendments and electoral reforms have never been actively debated in the parliament thanks to the time and the tax payer’s money spent on walkouts and party clashes.
Judiciary and press have been doing better although there have been cases of rampant corruption in the judiciary.
With the main pillars of democracy in shambles, the system offers no raison d’etre. Indian people have shown themselves that they cannot elect good leaders just because politicians have taken care that they have never been fed the intelligence to do so. The youth of today have totally lost belief in the existing political system. They are too afraid of rampant corruption, too reluctant to get down and clean the mess and too strong in believing that the system cannot be overhauled or changed. Greeks might have had success with democracy, but we Indians haven’t had any and taking cue from the ground reality we must embrace ourselves for a change. What India needs is a new brand of leadership that does not have to bother about wooing voters and countering opposition sneers. What India needs is a small set of “honest” people with sweeping powers devoid of politicking. In short, what India needs is dictatorship.
A dictator needs to rise in India either through a coup or though a civil war and put an end to this messy democracy. A true leader who has vision, strategy and conviction is needed and needed urgently. Until then we’ll be languishing seeing the rest of the world growing stronger and better and "visionaries" like Kalam can only be termed naively optimistic to proclaim that we would be a developed country by 2020.
