The Hindu Business Line : Joyless Independence Day

I was among the tens of thousands in the country who danced in the streets in youthful exuberance on the first Independence Day when, in the exhilarating and immortal words of Jawaharlal Nehru, India “woke to life and freedom”. There have been ups and downs in the march of the nation since then, but I never remember another Independence Day as bleak and joyless as this year’s.

The minds of all those who were aglow on August 15, 1947, with the anticipation of the great and glittering future awaiting free India are full of ominous forebodings.

In a country which has exalted the apostle of peace and non-violence as the Father of the Nation, barbaric violence hangs like a thick and impenetrable pall over the landscape.

The legacy of freedom heroes who had sacrificed their all with no thought for their ease and comfort and even life lies shattered. In whatever direction one turns, one sees nothing but wanton and wilful trampling under feet of time-honoured values.

Role models

Rare indeed are role models in public life of tolerance, honesty, service before self, consideration for others, large-heartedness, devotion to duty and commitment to public weal.

Even at the dawn of Independence, the titans of the ilk of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajaji, Rajendra Prasad and S. Satyamrti had a premonition about corruption taking hold of every walk of life.

Gandhiji made it the theme of his prayer meetings in his last days.

In fact, Rajaji, true to his reputation for far-sightedness, wrote as early as in 1924 about the future political and governing classes coming under the vice-like grip of corruption.

Mortal danger

Not one of them would have foreseen the monstrous extent to which it has spread its tentacles from the highest to the lowest echelons in all the three branches of the government.

There is the story of a citizen abjectly pleading with a functionary not to torment him with the cruel demand for bribe, and the functionary replying that he does not grant any such reprieve even to his own parents!

There was a time immediately after Independence when it was taken as axiomatic that persons holding public office would be high-minded men of character, attaching supreme importance to accountability and probity.

None dared to even imagine in those days that persons charged with heinous crimes will get elected to Parliament and State legislatures in such large numbers and even be cosily accommodated in Cabinets. Or, that accusations of participating in shady activities will be levelled against judges of the High Courts and the Supreme Court.

The much touted rule of law has thus become a mockery and the prevailing ethos has become one of each person being for himself, obsessed with getting rich quick by whatever means.

Never before, in all the period after Independence, has the entire country been in such mortal danger from terrorist strikes of untold ferocity.

Nor has it been apparently so defenceless against them, the Government resisting all demands for bringing the laws equal in rigour to those of the UK and the US whose democratic traditions and concern for human rights and civil liberties are certainly longer-standing than India’s.

All in all, it is an extremely disturbing prospect for “We, the People” who are short changed at every turn by those very persons who are their elected servants and have been reduced to just mute and helpless pawns in the games that politicians play.

B. S .RAGHAVAN