Celebrating Independence
by Satish Tandon, 15 August 2006
Independence Day, for any country, is usually a time for celebration and to reflect on the achievements of the previous years. Big preparations costing hundreds of millions of dollars are under way all over the country to celebrate our 58th birthday. What are we celebrating?
Shall we celebrate the wholesale violation of the great universal values of democracy, pluralism, and social and economic justice? Are we going to celebrate the persistent poverty and sub-human conditions of life of seventy percent of our people? Or to be positive, perhaps we should celebrate the extraordinarily affluent lifestyles, bordering on vulgarity, of the 2 percent of our population who control ninety percent of the wealth in India . We will celebrate the inability of half of our population to buy a second meal on any day while our granaries remain overflowing with grain. We will also be celebrating the lack of water, electricity, sanitation, roads, hospitals and schools for a majority of our people.
We should proudly celebrate the power of our police and security forces who indulge in arbitrary arrests and torture. They eliminate undesirables by staging encounters. Their word is law and most times we never really know where some people disappear. Perhaps we should celebrate the fact that tens of thousands of people all over India who remain in police lockups for years without any formal charges being brought against them. At the same time we should also celebrate our newly-acquired capabilities in the nuclear field.
We shall be celebrating freedom from the British but not from hunger, illiteracy, disease, bureaucratic tyranny, hollow words and empty promises. We shall celebrate our right to choose our own oppressors. We will celebrate our right to elect Tytler, Sajjan Kumar and many more of the same kind in place of a foreign-appointed General Dwyer to massacre our own people. Of course, Tytler and Sajjan proved beyond doubt we are better than our erstwhile masters by getting many more Sikhs killed in 1984 than Dwyer who managed to kill only 1700 something in 1919. We must celebrate the hint of accountability among our politicians reflected in the involuntary resignation of Jagdish Tytler as minister for his role in the anti-Sikh riots after 21 years.
Fifty-eight years ago we made a tryst with destiny. We exchanged a set of foreign rulers for the home grown variety. We replaced the British whose self-admitted mission in India was to civilize with the Indian politician whose mission is personal aggrandizement. We exchanged efficient and results-oriented British administration for maladministration, governance for inertia and non-action. We replaced able foreign administrators for Indian criminals. We exchanged foreign masters who would come and go for indigenous goons who go on and on.
For most Indians there is little to celebrate and hardly anything to look forward to. But our politicians will be celebrating Independence Day again in a big way because as inheritors of India from the British they are the ones who not only received the ‘estate' but also appropriated far greater power and control over finances and state machinery - unfettered by accountability and responsibility - than the British could ever manage. We shall celebrate the fact that no senior Indian politician has ever been convicted for his crimes in a court of law.
Let us congratulate the thousands of our politicians - both, those in power and those temporarily out - on this day, and the owners of private sector big businesses and multinationals and their top-level employees for whom independence has a meaning. For the rest, the overwhelming majority of Indians, a dignified life and real independence is still a dream.