This is the second day of 2007, a year that will be celebrated across India as the 60th anniversary of our independence. Much will be said by the political class. Many eulogies will be delivered with the predictable high pitched emphasis on ‘nationalism’, old-fashioned patriotism, and there will be fake attempts to put that much-neglected area of our indigenous and plural cultural traditions and special strengths onto a temporary pedestal. All this for populist reasons because, over the last many decades, a tired ruling class, assisted by a dull and bureaucratic administration, has compelled this land of skill, energy and creativity into a stupor.

As you travel across this incredible land, meeting diverse social, cultural and linguistic groups and communities, the extraordinary fabric of India, with its intricate patterns, motifs, symbols and myths, philosophies and thought, spells the most binding truth of civilizations — that of finely tuned unity in complicated diversity. Those of us who have experienced India over the years can sense that fine and enduring strength but can also see the degradation that has overwhelmed and distorted the fine-tuning of our society. Exploitation has replaced the freedoms guaranteed to the people by the Constitution, all because of faulty governance and the shameful, ever-growing complicity of politicians and babus in the misuse of power.

Thinking through the issues that confront a changing subcontinent, finding active and intelligent solutions to problems of identity whether in term of class, caste and creed, ensuring a sane, efficient and compassionate distribution of resources, making the administrators accountable for their ineptitude, are some areas where the failure has been truly detrimental to the growth of free India as a dynamic world force. The inability of our rulers to respect the pluralism and multi-cultural reality of Bharat has been another fundamental error of political judgment.

New tryst

Playing ‘monopoly’ and ‘polarization’ has reduced us to an infighting, insular nation that has lost sight of its inner strengths, motivations and pride in itself. The only class that has benefited from these all-inclusive and selfish stratagems is the ruling class and its babus.

Sadly, in Circa 2007, there are no indications that the present ruling class has energized itself intellectually or committed itself to an exciting challenge for the future. Leadership appears even more complacent than before, akin to a lazy buffalo wallowing in mire, knowing it will be fed, watching the world go by.

Sixty years after Independence, this young nation is ruled by aged and infirm men and women carrying baggages with gaping holes and frayed edges. The prime minister would do well to gift India some young and fresh leaders who are not carrying the baggage of failed politics and governance, and men and women who do not have any ‘experience’, in an effort to break out of the present paradigm and move. In India, ‘experience’ means ‘failed attempts’, and there is nothing to learn from those examples except how not to do it. That is what the governments across India need to understand and act upon.

India has been assaulted with misrule, plagued with misappropriation of resources, damaged by self-serving, inept authorities, and drowned in corruption. It really cannot get much worse. All parliamentarians in Delhi who sit in that once-exalted House as representatives of this nation, should put their hands on the heads of their children, not on a religious book and swear that they will either cleanse themselves and their operations or quit being in public life. This should be their new tryst, a truthful one, with destiny.