A nation united in rage

Last week's diabolical terrorist attack has left the national psyche in tatters -- and to hell with those who keep on harping about the `great spirit' of Mumbai. That's now a ghastly joke, surely.

A sense of outrage hangs thick over the country. People are angry, asking questions, demanding answers, saying enough is enough. It doesn't take Aristotelian syllogism to deduce this. Indeed, you don't even have to look beyond the miniature screen of your cellphone to comprehend that the mood is sullen and unforgiving.

Most of this seething anger is directed against politicians. While hundreds of smses swirling around may have come as sick jokes lampooning only a few (Raj Thackeray not surprisingly taking the brunt), the tirade seems to be against the political class as a whole. Is this an awakening then or just a witchhunt?

In one sense, it is a conundrum. If in a democracy politicians are by, of and for the people, the blame should take a 360 degree turn and come back to us for having chosen them. And yet, such has been the state of our politics that people feel hapless in controlling their own destinies, and now more than ever before, are questioning why.

Social scientist Sunil Khilnani attempts to address this vexing problem in his treatise, An Idea of India. He highlights the danger that voting and elections could become like a drug-fix through which people get an every once-in-a-while little taste of the power that is actually theirs, but in fact isn't, because the agenda of public welfare is quickly discarded by politicians, only to be given mock credence when the next elections become due.

In cahoots with the political class is the bureaucracy. In his new book Imagining India (of which I have only read the extracts) Infosys stalwart Nandan Nilekani trains his spotlight on another facet of the same problem: "For many of us in India, governance has been an intractable problem, one very difficult to change owing to the deep-rooted bureaucracy and opaque lines of power…Many believe that only if such structures are completely destroyed can anyone hope to build something better."

Juxtaposing both these in the current context, a story in the Indian Express (page 3, November 29) grabbed my attention. Defence minister A K Antony, says the report, had talked about the threat of terrorists using the sea route to infiltrate into the country at least SIX times in the past two years, once even as early as in March 2007!

For India's 8000 mile coastline, the Coast Guard has an inadequate sanctioned strength of 106 vessels and 52 aircraft, but in fact has only 92 ships and 45 aircraft, many of them obsolete. A parliamentary panel had noted then that there was a serious gap in the surveillance capability of the maritime forces. Most of the procurements, however, are reportedly still pending at the defence ministry. Does this make it easy for terrorists to infiltrate our borders? Should we even ask?

So the government lapses seriously, and what does the opposition do? In rhetoric plenty but in real terms very little over the last two years. Indeed, with brazen opportunism, L K Advani and Narendra Modi, who had called the late ATS chief Hemant Karkare a `desh drohi' only a few days earlier, now turn coat and call him a martyr. The hypocrisy is, of course, not lost on anybody.

Truth is that India has been treated as prime real estate by politicians (and by extension, bureaucrats) of various hues to fight over. The social fabric of the country remains as fragile, perhaps more, than it was in 1947. Caste and communal divides, income disparities between classes haven't really diminished. The immediate needs of people and a long-term view of the nation have become secondary to the pursuit of power for the sake of it.

This has gotten accentuated over the past couple of decades wherein greed of money now supplements power-lust. Economic growth is laudable, but the India Shining rhetoric has been used as a great camouflage for non-governance; for lulling people into a false sense of well-being by giving dollops of hype. I dare say that the media has not been entirely exempt from this: Oeople buying luxury yachts, for instance, has found greater play in the media that what the country's maritime defence shortcomings are.

So, while we are touted as a vibrant democracy, we may actually be a democracy under siege: Which perhaps is why we are all so angry now.