Recently I picked up Mark Tully and Satish Jacobs’s Mrs. Gandhi’s Last Battle: Amritsar.
And as soon
as I finished reading the Preface I had a doubt over when was it written. The
footnote said November 1985 but the narrative and the theme sounded so familiar.
It talked about the maladies of our administrative service modelled on the
lines of the Raj’s ICS and called out the flaws in Indian Police Service. The rampant
corruption and the loopholes in the system allowed the wealthy and influential
to let the culprits get away. The snail pace of the judicial system did not
help either in restoring the faith among the common public that the culprits
will be brought to justice.
The
bureaucracy and the oldest political party consisted of time-servers who were
ever ready to please their political bosses in lieu of future rewards. The
institutions called for reform if we had to be modern and step into the 21st
century. This is how the authors describe the country’s scenario in 1985.
Fast-forward
it to 2014, amidst the brouhaha surrounding the General Elections later this
year and we find the above issues repeated again and again in the speeches of
our political leaders. Everyone is claiming that he/his party will do all that
is right.
30 years
have passed since then and we have had 8 prime ministers with both national parties
having a chance to rule and still we are stuck in the same old mire, trying to
find a way out. All this chest beating in the name of the next big Superpower
can for a moment take the focus of the current problems. But in reality, we
still haven’t made a sincere effort to move forward. All the while we have been
passing the buck.
I might be
accused of giving a melancholy perspective. But I believe it is essential to
look both at the good and the bad to take a correct stock of things. Transparency
(RTI) and the growing awareness amongst the public are two great positives
which might help us buck the trend and move ahead.
