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“Kleptocratic
India, The Enemy is Within!” is the title of a thought-provoking article
written by Mr. M. G. Devasahayam, a former Army and IAS Officer, who happened
to be posted as the District Magistrate of Chandigarh in June, 1975, when
Indira Gandhi ushered in the long, dark night of Emergency, and into whose
custody-in-jail Lok Nayak Jaya Prakash Narayan (JP) was sent by the District
Magistrate of Delhi. The author believes that the Emergency “ushered in, and
ripped apart, India’s delicately crafted and carefully nurtured democratic
fabric and the institutions of governance.” Tracing the rot in the breakdown of
the elite All India Services, when a “committed bureaucratic-police coterie had
been smuggled into the Prime Minister’s Household (PMH), and positioned in the
Home Ministry, Delhi Administration, and Police” the author delineates the
steep decline in the governance of the country, and quotes the Supreme Court’s
observation about the “nexus between law
makers, law keepers, and law breakers.” It is an article that all citizens of India must read and be
concerned about the future of this nation, which in 2014 was fast moving
towards becoming a ‘failed state’ until
the people rescued it by drumming the Congress out of office.
But then, did the rot
really set in with the Emergency? How did Indira Gandhi come to believe that
she could take such an extreme step and get away with it? Is only the ruling
elite of India responsible for the current state of affairs? What has been the
role of the individual citizen in permitting this “Trojan Horse” to infiltrate
and subvert the collective conscience of the nation? I think we need to look at
ourselves a little more closely, and not only from the end of the Nehru era but
also right from the time when we seriously began to entertain the idea of a
nation free from foreign rule. From the time we achieved our independence in
1947, we have turned from a nation of brainwashed patriots to a population of
in-turned selves. All that we, as an independent nation, have ever cared for is
personal destiny: all the other destinies have become burdens. We have failed
to see what is really happening; and just as we also failed to
evolve new political parties to meet the needs - and dangers - of an
increasingly self-centred society, so also we have lacked the honesty to throw
away the old masks. Obsession with self is everywhere, and it is reflected in
the over 1000 political parties that have sprouted to “fleece the farmers and
small investors of their flesh and bones.”
Truly speaking, what we
achieved in 1947 was not real freedom but a craving for freedom. Our freedom is
a myth in its simple, primary sense. Unlike the Americans (whom we wish to
emulate in every way), who have created their own myth of free will, where one
can choose oneself and will oneself, we have extrapolated freedom from all
living reality. It is a thing in the mind, a dream world we secretly retreat
into from our daily ordinary reality. That is what permits our extraordinary
tolerance to national decay, of somehow muddling through, our Marxist
conservatism and our Nehruvian conservative socialism. Our society, and its actual state, is nothing; merely the dead
real world, not the living imaginary one; and that is why we have evolved a
rhetoric that always means more than it says, both emotionally and
imaginatively. The real tyranny comes from the totally accepted belief in the
system, the existing social framework.
The communication
industry consisting of the press in the early days, and later of the visual
media, sap and leach the native power away, insidiously imposing their own
conformities, their limits of vision; denying any existence of what they cannot
capture. As John Fowles observed in his magnificent novel ‘Daniel Martin’: “Our
cinema and television, through frequently repeated experience, create a paradigmatic
effect by analogy, much beyond the immediately seen - indeed, all spheres of
life where a free and independent imagination matters.” The much-proclaimed
transience of television images and reports is no consolation; one might as
well argue that since no one drink can by itself cause cirrhosis, tippling
holds no danger. In spite of their
vaunted virtues as disseminators of popular art and instant democracy, there
has begun to smell something rotten in the state of both these dominant media. Fowles
again: “There is something ominously stereotyping, if not positively
totalitarian, in the machine and its servants.” But, just as there is no doubt
that many Chinese who did not like Mao and the Communist Party, yet felt that
treason against their country was a worse crime, we have inured ourselves to
these feelings. The latest case is of Nishant Agarwal, a young 20-something
techie working on India’s vital defence systems. The #MeToo campaign raging on
social media, brutally exposes the rot that has set in the film and television
industry. Fowles was perhaps writing about Hollywood and the British Film
industry when he wrote: “The
commercial cinema is like a hallucinogenic drug: it distorts the vision of all
who work in it. Its madams, pimps, whores and bullies masquerade publicly as
‘distinguished’ directors and stars, famous producers and agents, simply
showing how much there is to hide.” It is
perhaps too early to write the history of the period. But when it comes to be
written, the media and the communication industry will come in for serious
indictment. The hucksters had wilfully blocked a connection
between national reality and national awareness of it. But the public, who
allowed the block to take place, and to endure, will also stand indicted in the
dock. We tolerated a clogging phlegm of pundits and pontificators, editors,
interviewers, critics, columnists, media humbugs, puppet personalities, shyster
lawyers and attitude-hijackers; a combined media Mafia, squatting on an
enormous dung heap of empty words and tired images, and conjoined, despite
their private rivalries and jealousies, by one common determination: to retain
their own status and importance in the system they had erected.
The fact is that no one
really listens anymore, nothing registers: an audience of one billion is an
audience of no one. The speed of forgetfulness is approaching the speed of
sound. We hear and see, and the next moment it is expurgated. To criticize the
glamorization of the worthless, the flagrant prostitution of true human values,
the substitution of degree of exposure for degree of actual achievement, now
invites an immediate accusation of harbouring obscurant ideas, of being out of
touch. Natural processes are all being cosmeticized. The real function is not
to inform, but to excuse one from thinking. One feels a pervasive cancer at the
heart of one's world; but still prefers it to the surgical intervention that must
extirpate the affected organ, preferring the cancer to a freedom from it.
We have perfected the
art of compromise, which in reality is a refusal to make a choice - out of cowardice,
apathy, and a selfish laziness. The act of going on vacations on election days
for some is thought to be “intellectual” as voting is something the uneducated,
illiterates do! Now with the NOTA option there are some who will take the
trouble of going to the election booth but express their angst through this
choice, little realising that the refusal to make a choice in itself is
choosing the greater evil.
The Great White Hope of
the Congress party refuses to take any responsibility either to help his party
out of the morass in which it is stuck, or even to help his family in retaining
its hold on power. Being born mummified, his failure to adapt is a result of the huge
superstructure of wealth, tradition, family, that he has to carry; but the
analogy is better made with the last of the brontosaurs, whose armor dragged
them down. When he looks in the mirror, he does not see the reflection of an
extinct creature, but instead paints an ideal, dream-self on the glass and
begins to see himself in that image.
In the coming elections
the country is going to choose its rulers from among a-thousand-and-more
political dispensations that are no different in their ideologies, of which the
disorder known as kleptomania is the
central core. Narendra Modi, in the four years until now, has proved that this
disorder is absent from his make up. It is up to us now to seize the moment and
make a paradigmatic shift in our political evolution. Another five-year term
for Modi will ensure that the Brontosaurs do not get hatched in some forgotten
Jurassic park. If we choose correctly and make this shift, we will give
ourselves a fair chance to evolve into a civilisation that our ancestors had
striven towards before the invasions of the trolls that came from the West. No
form of life or political idea has survived on the basis of enforced equality. The
whole of evolution depends on the freedom of the individual to develop in his
own way. All history, human and natural, demonstrates that - again and again. The
country's last chance of walking out of this enforced equality is in our hands.
Will we seize it?
Vijaya
Dar
Link to M. G.
Devasahayam’s article:
http://karnataka.bjp.org/kleptocratic-india-the-enemy-is-within/
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