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Shashi Warrier

The First Stone

Agni

The 50th anniversary of India's independence is just behind us and there is much to cheer. Out of a population approaching a billion, close to thrice what it was in 1947, fewer people die of starvation now. A recurrence of the greater famines, such as the one in the forties when the crops failed and there was no rice coming in from Burma, is highly unlikely, if not impossible.

Average life expectancies have gone up from around 30 years at the turn of the century to perhaps 60 now. Villages have electric power, mechanisation is reaching everywhere, the electronic media reach everywhere. The average Indian is better fed, better clothed and better housed that he was 50 years ago. He is also perhaps better informed, though I'm not sure that TV automatically brings a higher level of awareness of anything besides advertisements for consumer goods.

In 50 years, we have achieved a large degree of self-reliance in many areas. We even have a budding arms industry which, in a couple of decades, has a chance of meeting international standards. Literacy levels have gone up: Indians shine all over the world in areas such as computer software and research.

Yes, there is much to cheer. But there is the other side as well, the tears. Over a third of the population, more than divided India's population in 1947, lives in conditions no better that those of the poorest in the early forties, just before independence. We have a bloated bureaucracy that has just helped itself to an even larger share of the country's income without offering any corresponding increases in efficiency, productivity or effectiveness. We are extremely vulnerable on the energy front and will continue to be so well into the next century, despite assurances to the contrary. Our defence policies, thanks to the lack of transparency, could well be inadequate.

In 50 years, there's also a change in the standards of morality: now there are many shades of grey, which were all once unambiguously black, and deeds which would have been unacceptable in 1947 are routine today.

We have an imprisoned ex-chief minister who still rules his state through his wife, whom a rubber-stamp legislative assembly accepted as their ruler, though she has little knowledge of what happens outside her kitchen. We have news reports that the likeliest winner in a race for the chief minister of Maharashtra now is a convicted gangland don. We have a prime minister who openly admits he can't do a thing about corruption but has no qualms about hanging on to power.

Arun Gawli

There's violence, within and without. We have neighbours on the warpath, ethnic tensions within, and several running sores in terms of terrorist movements -- separatist, religious and political. For the first time, we're seeing a measure of success in fighting terrorism being damped by accusations of human rights violations directed at police officials.

But, to my mind, perhaps the saddest casualty of all in these 50 years is good old common sense, for we seem to have developed a strangely skewed sense of values which shows up in strange ways. The other day, for instance, a bus fell into a river in Madhya Pradesh, killing 40 or so people. As best as I know, there was no follow-up action. None at all. But the recent fire in a Delhi theatre that claimed 50-odd lives caught the attention of the public and caused an unprecedented level of outrage.

How come? There's so much corruption in our road transport system: you can buy a driving license for a few hundred rupees, or perhaps a thousand or so. While it's not the intention, by any stretch of the imagination, to defend the owners of the movie theatre that burnt down, how can we prosecute them while nothing is done, for instance, about the owners and drivers of Delhi's infamous Red Line buses, which probably claimed as many lives as the last war with Pakistan? Is it because deaths on the roads and in rivers are so common that we've developed mental calluses towards them?

The army in Kashmir

Would perhaps a few more theatres going up in smoke inure us to death in burning theatres as well?

This loss of common sense has cost us dearly in other ways. Turn, for instance, to some of our more egregious criminals. Veerappan in the south is negotiating a truce with Tamil Nadu. Phoolan Devi has made it to parliament where she threatens to immolate herself if the cases against her are not dropped. Arun Gawli bids fair to become the next chief minister of Maharashtra. To me, this seems roughly equivalent to installing General Dyer of Jallianwala Bagh notoriety in the office of the president of India.

A former minister under whose orders the police opened fire at a mob some years ago, killing five and leaving the sixth a vegetable, now seeks to pass the buck on to the police who did the firing: by the same standards, Hitler would have been declared innocent of war crimes because he only ordered them committed.

Veerappan

On to justice, to serve which it's important not that the innocent are let free but also that the guilty are punished. This is reminiscent of the ancient recipe for rabbit soup, the first line of which says, "First catch your rabbit." We don't seem to have the means or, for that matter, the intention to catch the guilty. What, for instance, has happened in the Harshad Mehta scam half a decade down the line? A few bank officials are in trouble but Mehta himself is not only free but has others queuing up to meet him. What for, I wonder. To work out their own scams, perhaps?

They say people deserve the government they get, and we are an outstanding example. We blame our leaders for everything that's going wrong, but we're the ones who voted them to their positions in the first place. If our leaders tend to bribe us into voting for them, it's at least in part because we fall for it ourselves. And so, to misquote the Bible, let he who is without blame cast the first stone.