Clearer and Farther
Those who are really convinced that they have made progress in science would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for the old.
V.I.Lenin in his pamphlet “What Is To Be Done?” (1901)
Vladimir Illyich Lenin brought about the epoch-altering 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, more or less by dint and force of his own character. He led from the front, and his party men followed as he finally turned out, not just the Tsar, but his moderate Menshevik colleagues too, and seized power. This, despite being personally irascible and unpleasantly blunt. Still, the reason why the Bolsheviks stood fast behind Lenin was because he saw the issues in a clearer perspective, and thought much further forward, than anyone else around him- including the altogether more persuasive Trotsky.
Today, as India stands presumptive on the threshold of its transformational renaissance, the political leadership lacks an overarching and strong vision to tackle the tremendous and widening disparity between the haves and the have-nots. This is all the more urgent as India’s economy grows at near double digits, and cannot but be seen as a callous and glaring failure of policy.
But all we can witness towards addressing this great shame is lip-service and lousy implementation of some desultory and wasteful poverty alleviation programmes. Nobody seems willing to set about solving the problem as one of our two greatest priorities by throwing massive intellectual and monetary resources at it. We need productive and sustainable rural prosperity for sixty percent of our people. Indeed, if we confined our planning process to this one objective, we would probably be using those fine economists in the Commission far better.
The other looming and lurking 800 pound gorilla receiving little enough attention is the crying need for comprehensive modernisation and infrastructure creation. What’s being done, and it is not as if nothing is happening, is woefully inadequate and hardly on par with the best global standards.
Let us enumerate a few of our inadequacies: We have perhaps one quarter the electrical power we need with little hope of catching up at the pace we have adopted; our roads and highways are better than before, but hardly world standard; our railways are still in the 19th century with electric and diesel locomotives tacked on in place of steam engines. Our overall systems and processes are obtusely labyrinthine and medieval. Our government to people interaction is feudal and colonial in tone and tenor. Our legal system is ponderous and its backlogs gargantuan. Our water is unfit to drink. Our food is sub-standard in quality and neither stored nor processed properly. Our municipalities are totally swamped, chaotic, ignorant of civic standards, and garbage is piled high everywhere. The listing of our weaknesses is nearly endless. Nothing works in a manner befitting a developed country, not even in the show-piece capital of New Delhi, aspire as we might; and the end is nowhere in sight.
We manage to be self-satisfied nevertheless, consoling ourselves that things are better today than they were yesterday. But the fact is, in a rapidly globalising and technologically driven world, we cannot afford to move at our quaint and antiquated pace any longer. We are not only left far behind the now near-bankrupt developed world; but practically all the other emerging nations of every political persuasion, including the much cited BRIC or ASEAN or the GCC, the G-20, even most of the nations in the UN General Assembly!
And yet we want, and will probably get, for a variety of favourable geopolitical reasons, a permanent seat in the UNSC. We will be the most under-developed UNSC member of them all, with little hope of catching up, and hard-pressed to meet our consequent obligations on the world stage.
This gradualism, the hallmark of our policy-making in all matters, may be wise enough to contain political paradoxes but here could yet be the blight that wrecks the promise of a better future. Perhaps it isn’t this realisation that matters, otherwise it wouldn’t be ignored. But if more states vote to reward development as they have in Bihar recently, and in Gujarat before that, then the broader political classes will have to move out of their extended stupor for their own survival.
We cannot afford to be slow. And yet, each successive Railway Budget for instance, does not attempt to upgrade our railway system into something appropriate to the 21st century, like France’s exemplary TGV system. Instead we tinker with old-hat populism as if we were still in the socialist dawn of 1950 and the informed commentary is relieved because train fares are not raised!
The Union Budget 2011, as usual, will also focus on a plethora of micro issues, provide miniscule reliefs and tweak existing provisions, in a masterful balancing act signifying very little and showing the way forward not at all.
There will be no bold strokes, no Maoist attempt at a “great leap forward” with its exciting possibilities and ambition. This even as the term Maoist itself has changed meaning completely from the policies and homilies written down by the partly forgotten Chairman in that once fashionable Little Red Book. Today a Maoist refers to tribal and agent provocateur terrorists in India’s jungle tracts trained, supported and sustained covertly however, by China.
Revolutions don’t often produce the results the people may want, as is borne out by the rear-guard and vainglorious action Colonel Muammar Gadhafi is fighting before his imminent ouster after 42 years of iron-fisted tyranny. But he too has ruled so long in the name of the people. He too wrote his telephone-directory sized Green Book in lieu of the institutions he destroyed.
But asking for policies that promote rural prosperity and widespread creation of new state-of-the-art infrastructure is not ideologically revolutionary. China and Brazil and Russia have adopted this path to their lasting benefit despite some excesses and redundancies. But at least they have left the era of chronic shortages of essential enablers behind and can concentrate on refining their governance.
India needs to do something urgently. Now, when both credibility and resources mobilisation are far less of a constraint than they have ever been in our 62 year republican history, there is no excuse to keep going slow. The Leninesque bit will however be in throwing out gradualism in favour of a dramatic makeover.
(1,066 words)
26th February 2011
Gautam Mukherjee
Published at Leader on the Edit Page of The Pioneer with the same title on March 12, 2011 and also online at www.dailypioneer.com and in the pioneer epaper. Also archived undr Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com
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