What Price Freedom?
The fruits of freedom were hijacked by rascals and charlatans, says ERVELL E MENEZES
It’s 63 years now since we achieved Independence and still it is as fresh as if it were just yesterday. The hoisting of the national flag and the celebrations that followed were memorable, but at the tender age of seven, it is too soon for the real significance of the event to sink in. That came with the inevitable passage of time.
We grew up knowing the importance of freedom for our country. Things began to change, slowly and not too surely. It took us time to assimilate all its implications; how power can and must be handled, and the pitfalls of corruption or what good governance really is.
There came the Five Year Plans and India’s ‘new temples’ – gigantic irrigation projects like the Bhakra Nangal Dam. Rivers were dammed and electricity provided to the villages. But there was always a wide gap between the urban and rural areas. Then came the division of the country into linguistic states and other decisions, not all good.
Corruption crept in and spread like a cancer. The princes were divested of their purses and titles, but their benefits accrued to the politicians, the Ministers to be precise. “A deaf government and a dumb people do not make a democracy,” is a well known adage, and former British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill predicted a rough time for us, saying that there would be a time when we would be selling water and even air. We laughed at him then, but today it surely makes us think twice.
Although it was before our time, it was the fight for Independence that was so remarkable. It was like a one-point programme and it threw up leaders of the calibre of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and others. Who can forget the clarion call for freedom by Bal Gangadhar Tilak: “Freedom is my birthright and I shall have it!” It is rhetoric like this that fired others with zeal and fervour to finally achieve this goal.
But it seems that in the years after independence, the fruits of freedom were hijacked by rascals and charlatans who, like the devil, cited the scripture to serve their own purposes. There was no equitable distribution of the benefits of freedom, and the ‘aam admi’ (the common man) was deprived of their fair share.
For genuine equality of opportunity, private enterprise must be encouraged at all levels. But it is not. Take the case of cabbies in Mumbai. Being fitted with expensive CNG kits, they have to be bought by capitalists and run by the aam admi. At times, I am told, there are three drivers to each cab, which means the middle man is king.
At one time, there was a good number of private cabbies. This is the way out. Or by setting up co-operatives, using which Dr Verghese Kurien worked wonders with milk through Operation Flood in Gujarat. But no, it is inevitably the middle men and traders who reap the harvest for which the aam admi toils.
The Panchayati Raj is not implemented in toto and the panchayats, which are supposed to be grassroots organisations, are riddled with holes. I can cite the example of Goa and my own village of Bastora, as well as Goa and its ‘challis chors’, but let’s leave that for now.
Then we come to employment. How transparent is recruitment? Haven’t we heard of large sums of money given to secure government jobs? It is all true, because these jobs are permanent. Only death can do them part. As for work output, the less said the better. Those who work, work; those who don’t, don’t.
But the private sector is also not run effectively. These units often develop a mysterious ‘sickness’, natural or manipulated. Competence is a long-forgotten virtue, further diluted by reservations. Eventually, it boils down to vote banks; competence goes right out of the window.
It does not take an Emergency to run things well. It can be done at all times, if there is a will, and support from higher-ups. But to digress, we’ve just come to know that there are no records of the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s dreaded Emergency (she imposed a state of ‘Emergency’ on the country from 1975 to 1977 and imprisoned all opposition leaders). Can one believe that, or is it a sinister move to get young Indians to forget it?
Then we come to the Press – known as the Fourth Estate, an unofficial pillar of our democracy – which should act as a vibrant Opposition. But does it do so? Not really. Today, we know that only too well.
In the pre-Independence days, freedom was a common binding goal, and it worked well. Today, advertising and marketing have made inroads and almost taken over. We have leading newspapers like ‘The Times of India’ selling space on its news pages. The banner heading (on top of the page across all eight columns) has been hijacked by an advertisement. ‘Happy stories’ are the need of the hour, not tragedies. Beauty contests devour space, not farmer’s suicides. And, of course, the Page 3 folks; social events splashed with a plethora of pictures that breed the Lalit Modis, Vijay Mallayas, Sania Mirzas, Amitabh Bachchans and Preity Zintas of this world.
Once, an important political event – something to do with President Musharraf – was shunted onto an inside page in preference to some celebrity fluff. This writer rang up the editor. Guess what he did; he transferred my call to the news section! I just hung up. In our time, the editor took responsibility for everything that appeared (or did not appear) in his newspaper. But that was once-upon-a-time…
Rural editor P Sainath has much to say about the deterioration of the press in ‘Nero’s Guests’, which lashes out at the government (mainly in Maharashtra) for its acts of commission and omission. Still, as farmers continue to take their own lives, Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar stands firm as the proverbial rock. What have we come down to?
But let’s not be too cynical. Every dark cloud has at least one silver lining, and we must count our blessings. Aren’t we much better off than our neighbour Pakistan, which became independent just a day earlier?
For this, we are in debt to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi; she managed to keep her distance from the United States of America, and avoided India becoming its satellite. We must continue with this hands-off policy, and keep our options open. For, one never knows when a crisis will strike. And oh, for the advent of a new dynamic leader… Or is that asking for too much?
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Water Lessons
By Marc de Souza
At the rate it is raining, it appears that it will be a satisfactory monsoon, as long as the clouds keep consigning their treasure to the earth. It must rain at the right time, without long dry spells. We have reached the halfway mark; something like more than 50 inches of rain.
The power of water is such that you have to treat it like it has a soul of its own. Water is a living thing. This might sound superstitious, but it’s pretty much real. Water is a mutual interconnected need. It is a source of spiritual nourishment, frequently used in rituals, and endowed with a range of mystic and symbolic properties.
Water itself works in a tumultuous, eager system, powered by the mighty sun, rushing from sea to cloud to river to sea and back. Much of the water we use, curiously, is in a sense man-made. In one lifetime we have developed lakes, dams, reservoirs. In a reservoir, if you are lucky, water shines in the sun, and everything looks simple and at peace. Not so. Reservoirs are dangerously fouled by use and abuse.
During one brief century, mankind has passed the point of global opportunism and entered an era of global protection. There is hardly a place where the lesson is not written plain for all to see. We live in a changed world, and we are a changed nation.
Except for floods and droughts we ignore water, but our waters are troubled. When wells and springs dry out, we know the worth of water. Today our wells, especially in the villages, are running dry, and we are being faced with a critical shortage of clean, fresh water.
Almost every village in Goa is endowed with a spring – our outdoor heritage – its water generally having medicinal properties. Folks nearby that use these waters always feel privileged in this regard, as the spring water is pure for sure. Sad to say, not any more. If you get the water tested, you are likely to get a notation: “Background bacteria – Too numerous to count.” What has happened? With human activity, something has seeped into the aquifer and clouded people’s peace of mind. To put it mildly, this is the sorry state of our spring waters.
Few things are as insidious as bad water. It’s dangerous for you and your children, but you usually can’t tell if you have it. And if you do, you may not be able to find out where the problems are coming from.
Water’s nature itself is a part of these complications. This simple structure of hydrogen and oxygen has even been called the universal solvent. It takes into solution a vast number of substances, and what it can’t dissolve, it simply pushes along or grinds up fine enough to carry in suspension. Water can carry some of our most serious diseases too.
Human beings have put this characteristic of water to work in thousands ways. A lot of things we don’t want in water get in there anyway. If you pour poison on the ground, water will take it away to where it is going.
People everywhere are affected by soil and ground water contamination. They know we are pressed beyond limits we should not have exceeded. Also, trash and toxic waste has become an intractable problem. We are victims of our own success, drowning in our own garbage!
Our planet, like the delicate crystal globe on its pedestal, deserves the best care we can give it. We should ask whether humanity is meeting its most basic responsibility. The responsibility lies squarely with us. Will future generations praise our foresight or look back in anger at what we had, and what we lost forever?
