On India's sixty-fourth Independence Day, what can those bothered enough to reflect on it think about the country? The answer would depend on which section of the people one poses the question to.

For the urban middle-class, times could not have been better; jobs are aplenty, incomes are rising, so are malls, inflation is a matter for conversation with mothers or wives and things are always better with Coke, Pepsi and the i-Pad.

For the articulate young, while the West is sobbing at the sink, India is singing under the shower with an average growth rate of 8 per cent, but the trouble is with distant New Delhi or State capitals, where politicians with greasy palms stain India's fair name.

Passage through modernity

Turn to the vast majority of Indians huddled under the shadow of neon lights and the answers will be different, if they are forthcoming at all. Despair and indifference have their own language of rage — misdirected as it is against a film that almost no one (not even this writer) has seen, or ventilated at State apparatuses too indifferent to have cared in the first place. What emerges from these dark corners are a series of responses that — like it or not — form an essential part of our evolution as a nation: 64 years after Independence, the Indian Republic's record almost defies the laws of teleological history, seeming to present to the world an oddly syncretic journey down time.

Nothing sums up the strangeness of India's passage through modernity to a quirky post-modernism more than the Reservations-as-affirmative action. An economy that prides itself as the fastest growing after China has been unable to absorb the unemployed through market forces, forcing the jobless to seek quotas in the private sector.

Responses to the failure of the economy get stranger as backward castes such as the Gujjars of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh violently claim ‘Scheduled Caste' status simply to ‘upgrade' their economic privileges: Social mobility re-defined.

Which country does he mean?

When the Prime Minster waxes eloquent on economic success from the ramparts of the Red Fort, some Indians will agree; most will wonder which country he was talking about. So will every Indian who thinks about governance. It was the persistent lack of it and the neglect of those outside the magic spell of economic growth that led to the emergence of Maoism in the backward parts of eastern India. It is the stubborn refusal of policymakers in New Delhi and the States to re-learn the rules of social democracy that still fences them off from the poor.

Development programmes and Five-Year Plans, experts will say have failed because of poor implementation. Actually, something more basic has collapsed; the social compact that bound policymakers since the First Plan.

However corrupt, distorted, misdirected (think loan melas ), both development spending and apparently symbolic actions such as bank nationalisation and the abolition of privy purses resonated with purposive social democracy. That link with the marginalised now stands broken irrevocably despite the pious claims of inclusive growth; its rupture explains Maoism. But the irony is that the Maoists' attempt to fill the vacuum with their own social contract based on terror and violence has also collapsed because of its failure to improve the conditions of the oppressed.

Their so-called war against oppression and injustice has become, for all practical purposes, a war for the Maoists' survival as armies representing two political powers slug it out in jungles and fields, with the poor caught in the crossfire. In their fight for survival against the State's armed-to-the-teeth apparatus, the Maoists have had to subsume the social compact in almost the same way that the oppressive State had and continues to do so.

So, on this 64{+t}{+h} anniversary, it is not very clear which agency, the democratically elected State or the self-elected Maoist is defending the poor, just as it is difficult to determine where success fails or failure leads to emancipation.

Governance paradox

A similar paradox infects governance in a broader sense. The governance of natural resource that ought to be, in part, the responsibility of every citizen, with the government enforcing laws that reflect the delicate balance between development and environment, and between the present and the future, hardly exists.

While Indians could take justifiable pride in ensuring the Sardar Sarovar dam minimised environment damage or that Silent Valley stayed that way, which Indian in Mumbai could claim to have protected the various natural waterways that builders have systematically and callously filled and cemented over?

Cities need residential facilities and middle-class Indians must share the blame for having sacrificed the future for the present, in an alarming display of blind ignorance and mindless pursuit of wealth.

Yet we light candles for “Team Hazare” claiming indignant righteousness under the illusion that malfeasance is an exclusive privilege (certainly not a right) of political power.

But it hardly requires deep contemplation to realise just how much the corrupt act is not just a betrayal of secular and contractual responsibilities, but a moral one too.

Options for fraud are not to be found only in the corridors of power, lurking as they do within reach of any Indian unwilling to declare hidden wealth or income.

On the other hand, think of a government in our 64 years, or elsewhere in the world, that owned up, under the glare of the media undoubtedly, to the existence of corruption on its watch or allowed its Cabinet members to be jailed or, and here's a thought for corporate India, some top executives too?

The Lokpal Bill is undoubtedly flawed, but on this day what stands out is its part in a restless non-teleological, but nevertheless dialectical, evolution that up-ends notions of success and failure while abiding by multiple ideas of democracy.

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