Have We Failed Our Founding Fathers?

Arvind Panagariya, India-bornprofessor at Columbia University, has noted a remarkable absence. There isn't ,in New Delhi or elsewhere in India, a museum dedicated to the freedom movement.This is surprising given the rich and inspirational history that could haveserved as its source material. The reason could be that there isn't anunambiguously clear sense of achievement, a mission fully accomplished.Parents/teachers may find it difficult to tell their children /students whenthey take them to such museums : look, this is where we were once, and that iswhere we are now (the world outside the museum). On the 60th anniversary of theIndian republic we are still struggling, still a nation in themaking.The Indian people became sovereign on January 26, 1950 aftermembers of the Constituent Assembly signed on to the Indian Constitution. Thedrafting committee for the constitution was chaired by B R Ambedkar, a brilliantlawyer from an untouchable caste. This in itself symbolised the promise ofsocial equality and a dignified life for all Indians, whatever their caste,creed, colour or gender. The ‘conscience of the Constitution' was capturedin parts 3 and 4, which set out fundamental rights and directive principles.They are evidence of the full panoply of rights, worthy of a democratic welfarestate, envisaged for the newly empowered Indian citizen. They ranged fromprotection of personal liberty to freedom of expression and assembly, equalitybefore the law, freedom to profess one's religion, protection of minority rightsas well as access to education and social welfare. According to one of thedirective principles, for example, the state has a duty to raise the level ofnutrition and standard of living, while improving publichealth.Sixty years into the life of the republic, have Indians beenthus empowered? Reality has turned out much more Darwinian. The statistics areshameful. Male adult literacy is 73 per cent, for women it's a minuscule 48 percent. Of every thousand live births in India, 57 babies will die. A staggering46 per cent of children in the 0-5 age group are malnourished. According toconstitution expert Granville Austin, the framing of the Indian constitution was“perhaps the greatest political venture since that originated inPhiladelphia in 1787 (ie the American constitution).” Yet 60 years later,India clocks in at a lowly 134th in human development among 182 nations.Botswana, Guatemala, Bhutan and Equatorial Guinea are ahead. Thinkthe Palestinians are an oppressed people, hemmed in by Israel? They are still 24positions ahead of India in the latest HD index. So, what wentwrong? A standard response, and one with a measure of truth, is to blame thenation's venal political class. Instead of attracting those with a yen forpublic service, politics may have become the quickest route to upward mobilityin a nation starved of opportunity. The number of MPs who are crorepatisincreased from 156 in the last Lok Sabha to 315 in this one. About 20 per centof members in the current Lok Sabha have assets worth more than Rs 5 crore each.More tellingly, there has been a huge increase in the assets of the 304 MPs ofthe last Lok Sabha who contested the polls in 2009 as well. While in 2004 theseMPs were worth an average of Rs 1.92 crore each, by 2009 this figure had jumpedto Rs 4.8 crore, an increase of 150 per cent. All of this, mind you, is justtheir declared assets.What's worse, far too many of them havecriminal records. The number of MPs with criminal cases against them shot upfrom 128 in the last Lok Sabha to 150 in this one — 73 face seriouscharges. In other words, about 15 per cent of our MPs stand accused ofcommitting not just run-of-the-mill , but serious crimes such as murder.But while politicians have hardly ever enjoyed a clean image, therot has set into more reputable institutions as well: the police, the judiciary,the armed forces. Nothing highlights the all-round deterioration of institutionsmore than the Ruchika Girhotra case. Misusing his position of authority a seniorpolice officer molested a 14 year-old girl, a promising tennis player, on thepretext of arranging special coaching for her. But much worse was to follow. Tocover up the crime Ruchika was thrown out of her school, goons (cops out ofuniform?) arranged to abuse and threaten her, false cases were filed against herfamily and friends, her father was thrown out of his job, her brother chargedwith dacoity, thrown into jail and mercilessly tortured, before being paraded inhandcuffs in the locality in which they lived. Unable to take it all, the younggirl committed suicide. This isn't a story of personal villainy asin oldstyle Hindi films, where the villain rapes a girl and she commits suicidein shame. Rather, it's a tale of institutional depravity. In this case, Ruchikadid not play victim, she did what we would expect a model citizen to do in hersituation. She filed a complaint against SPS Rathore, the policeman in question.It's noteworthy that a period of three years elapsed between her molestation andher suicide. She did try to get justice through the system, but it failed herwhile inflicting increasing persecution on her and her family , finally breakingher spirit. Amid growing evidence of his criminality, honours were heaped on herpersecutor, who rose to the rank of director general of police (remember,Ruchika and her supporters had filed a public complaint and an initial inquiryreport had indicted Rathore). Ruchika's tale of unaccountableauthority — resembling Kafka more than 1970s Bollywood — has toucheda chord across the country. If this is what a middle-class family in a premierIndian city has to go through (Ruchika's father was a bank manager inChandigarh), just imagine the plight of the unlettered and voiceless in therural hinterlands. Juxtaposing Ruchika's and her family's experiences againstthe liberties guaranteed by the Indian Constitution is a chilling exercise. Whatchance is there of enjoying such liberties, if cops with political protectionare allowed to run amok? If there's a sense of drift and malaise inthe 60th year of the republic, that can be traced to a combination of twofactors: economic desperation together with widespread perceptions of theunfairness of the system. Stir into this cauldron a thousand crackpot ideas— whether it's the mandiristas, Mandalistas, Marathi manooswallahs, orMao's minions — and it's an explosive mix. In the closingdecade of the 20th century, when other Asian nations had moved on to the fasttrack of modernity and economic prosperity, the mandiristas divined a uniquesolution to India's myriad problems: build a grand temple where a mosque stood,since they could intuit that this was the exact spot where Rama was born in aheroic age that preceded our own. And in the opening decade of the 21st, theyunleashed carnage in Gujarat, casually tossing aside such constitutionalliberties as freedom of religious expression or even right to life.The Mandalistas, on their part, reduced ‘social justice' toits lowest common denominator: the proliferation of reserved quotas forpreferred castes and subcastes . If the mandiristas craved religious identity,caste excited the Mandalistas. Since it's politically incorrect to raise doubtsabout caste reservations as the highway to social justice, few ask the obviousquestion: if reservations are so efficacious, shouldn't half a century ofreservations have emancipated Dalits by now? Mandal having been raised to thestatus of a political theology, even the mandiristas have now joined theMandalistas. No wonder, the queue of those waiting to join the ranksof ‘oppressed' castes has grown very long. The army had to be deployed inRajasthan when Gujjars unleashed caste riots and brought the state to a halt,because their entry into the club had been denied. Given unceasingcaste violence, it may now be time to entertain a heretical thought. What if thefounding fathers of the republic, instead of focusing on reservations, hadensured schooling for all — accompanied by mid-day meals where children ofall castes and communities dined together? After all, free and compulsoryeducation for all children up to the age of 14 years is a directive principle inthe Constitution. If universal schooling along with midday meals had beenenforced, caste would have vanished in a generation. Communal sentiment wouldhave been less widespread if, say, Hindus and Muslims had grown up asschoolmates. It's always more difficult to stereotype a community when you knowthem intimately. Not to mention a whole host of positive side-effects ofuniversal school and meal coverage: illiteracy, child malnutrition and lack ofopportunity wouldn't have blighted the country, as they dotoday.While we're about it, another heretical thought may be inorder. Democracy in India may have been captured by middle-status groups insociety: middle classes, OBCs, rich farmers, organised workers. They have usedthe power of democratic representation to skew public policy in their favour,against the interests of those scraping the bottom of the barrel. Take thebonanza doled out to public sector employees every time there is a paycommission. No other country has a pay commission of this kind; it's a uniqueIndian institution. Taxpayer's money used to pay for such bonanzas is divertedfrom the poor, bringing about a redistribution of resources from the poor to thewell-off.Or take the vast amounts of grain that routinely rot in thecountry's public distribution system. The PDS is another unique Indianinstitution; most developing countries use food coupons or cash transfers tofeed the poor. But under the Fabian socialism that we prefer, thepoor cannot be entrusted to feed themselves. An intermediary behemoth, the FoodCorporation of India, has therefore been put in place. The FCI, besides breedingbabudom, provides handsome support prices for foodgrains whichdisproportionately benefit rich farmers. Then it lets most of the food slipthrough its fingers, whether by design or neglect. Who picks up the tab? Onceagain, the hapless taxpayer. It's pointless to call for crackdowns on hoardingin response to galloping food prices; the government is the biggest hoarder. Ithas been estimated that the cost of transferring a rupee to the poor through thePDS is Rs 6.68. It shouldn't be difficult to do the math: who truly benefitsfrom the government's sanctimonious ‘pro-poor' measures? No wonder thosemalnutrition numbers look so terrible. So we have the Constitution,with essentially modern values , on the one hand; and a tradition of mai-baapsarkar, with heavy colonial underpinnings, on the other. Who's poised to win? Onthe positive side, measures like the Right to Information Act have the potentialto render government a lot more transparent. As institutions like the IITs andInfosys have shown, it's possible to cultivate excellence even in this system.The global telecommunications revolution, together with the explosion of mobilephone connectivity, has empowered average Indian citizens with far moreinformation than ever before.This in turn has touched off a frenzyof rising expectations. That's causing stress in the system, but crisis can beopportunity too. Unless push comes to shove, the status quo may never change. Amillion mutinies could create anarchy and chaos; equally, they could set Indiaon a new path. Something, somewhere will have to give. Either democracy deepens,or it splinters. Either the system makes room for people, or people will takethe system down with them.The author is editor of the editorial pageof TOI