By Sanjay Dudani:
I don’t know whether it would be fair enough to question the very fundamentals of our Indian society and system on which we Indians are seemingly so proud of. The day a child is born he is taught the lessons of non-violence with personalities like Gandhi and Nehru as the models of this theory. Why is it the every morning we wake up, each one of us claim to be fundamentally non-violent and to all of us it doesn’t matter how bloody our past had been? It sounds bizarre to me that even after 300 years of the Mughal rule and another 300 years of English rule, we Indians see ourselves as non-violent Homo sapiens. The sub continent was prone to battles and blood but still we hand down the principles of non-violence generations after generations.
First of all the very policy of non-violence (the punch line of our rulers) is fundamentally flawed in its nature and kind. I make no bones about it to say that it was this very policy manoeuvred by Gandhi which won us our freedom back in 1947. But our policy makers need to understand in the first place that the strategic position of India in the global arena has changed gigantically compared to what it was during the Nehruvian era. India has never asserted to violence voluntarily but the price we had to pay for this has been monumental. Why is it that America has till date (after 9/11) been successful in combating terror but our agencies have failed on such a large scale?
Below is the explanation-
The most harrowing experience that I have gained about the Indian politics is the lack of consensus on matters of national importance. All our parties are responsible for our plight. What we should learn from the Americans is to react as Americans and not as individuals.
The second major factor which contributes to our failure is the lack of professionalism in our work. We need to understand that our apex agencies such as RAW, I.B. etc are not the only ones responsible for this humiliating mess. It’s basically the lack of support from other institutions that time and again exposes chinks in our armour. The lack of expertise and the technical training that a policeman (can be a traffic hawaldar) needs to have in order successfully face a dire situation of terrorism needs immediate attention.
Good intelligence (information) comes from effective networks and the cables that carry this information to the main servers are highly prone to corrosion or already been corroded. Is the problem lying within our system or with our genes? Is the “chalta-hai” attitude of the Indians the cause of our plight?
Quality institutions and people have always been nurtured in this country and can still be nurtured but the question is how? Dipankar Gupta, a well-known sociologist points that “We Indians have the will to succeed but not as society or as country but as individuals”. Our politicians turn out to be mere rulers but not as captains of an army leading upfront.
The major change our society has gone through is the identity transition. Our Preamble starts with the words “We the citizens” but somehow the momentum that the word “citizen” carries with it has been distributed to the various religious groups, caste groups etc. We have stopped identifying ourselves as Indians but rather we identify ourselves on the basis of our worship place and our mother tongue. The islands of excellence have been swamped by the oceans of incompetence by the so called “bureaucrats” of our society. The pursuit of individuality or the persistent occupation of success as individuals, have undermined the very fundamentals of our democracy.
Why is the “lokpal compaign” which was once so passionately followed by every individual come to a halt? Have we blinded ourselves to the chicanery of our politicians or have we assumed ourselves to be incompetent? Why is it that initially every scam is opposed so flamboyantly during the early days and after some time it dies down like a burnt paper?
The fault lies within our institutions which have failed to articulate the message of nationhood. The fault lies within our diplomatic arena which always uses non-violence as the veil for its incompetence. Nonetheless, the fault lies within us who are not able to break the barriers of religions sponsored to us by the colonial scholarship and work as individuals rather than Indians. It’s time to introspect our souls, my dear friends.