At the dawn of this century, my generation entered India’s workforce, buoyed by the country’s euphoria over new-found growth. Private capital, liberal outlook and global markets, it seemed, would fuel development. Big cities had room for small-town aspirants, the information technology sector was in its infancy, media was expanding, and the service sector exploded.
Alas, a quarter of a century later, the promise India held seems to be dissipating for both the middle class and the poor. The list of our chronic woes is endless: unemployment and unemployability, deepening rural distress, intermittent floods and droughts, rot in higher educational institutions, intolerance, and overarching uncertainty amidst islands of prosperity, efficiency and goodness.
The boom story, for most Indians, looks rosy only on paper. Move around in the crowded passenger trains, buses and shared autos and you will know what I mean. The Indian hinterland is crying for attention and, needless to say, help. Regional economies are tattered, heavily dependent on Central funds and mercy. Reliance on doles is turning out to be the only, if abysmally puny, panacea.
Our structural economic, ecological, social and political anomalies have taken a turn for the worse. In the meantime, the mirageous deadlines for when India will be great again are being extended routinely. Back in the year 2000, the target for India becoming great again was 2020. Now it is 2047-2050!
Unless we course correct, by 2050 we will have squandered every single opportunity we had to reconstruct and reimagine the republic. The wish list is long: rebuilding regional, mainly rural, economies; slaying inequalities of diverse nature — social, economic, regional, educational; healing the shattered ecologies — we need to leave the Himalayas, the Western Ghats, and the rivers to their own devices; recommit to constitutional democracy; discover spiritual paths by dumping religious fanaticism; and reset our long-held universal values and ethos. These are just some of the things on the list.
My wish list also has a cry for the restoration of some institutional justice, political and otherwise. It is prompted by several triggers. One, Umar Khalid still remains in prison. Second, last week, a freelance journalist in Chhattisgarh’s restive Bastar region was killed and his body dumped in the septic tank, allegedly by a local contractor. Sketchy emerging details say that he had 12 fractures in his head, his heart was slit and lungs ripped. Mukesh Chandrakar did what most of the legacy media outlets shy away from doing: he reported, without fear or favour, from one of the most difficult regions of the country, where metro and big media have no presence.
The barbarism with which Chandrakar was killed echoes in Maharashtra’s Beed district, where there are no Maoist operations. A young village sarpanch was killed so ruthlessly by the contractor-political-bureaucrat nexus that the district is still simmering. He challenged extortion and insisted upon the rule of law. Seven to eight sharp weapons were unleashed on him for over three to four hours. As he begged for water, his assailants urinated upon the dying, bleeding man. Beed is still burning because the criminal lackeys of a minister in the current Devendra Fadnavis-led government are roaming free and there is hardly any media to ask tough questions of the chief minister who also happens to be the state’s home minister. The district is like a private republic of one family close to both Fadnavis and Ajit Pawar.
They could kill because they know the system is with them. In another week, these, and many other incidents that point towards institutional decay, would be eclipsed from the social media timelines and other distractions will take over. New Delhi elections will be the first of these.
