What has been India's greatest achievement @75?
Without doubt it is that, though far from perfect, India is a functioning SECULAR DEMOCRACY that elects its political leaders every five years without any military coup!
It was India's good luck that it's top leadership around the time it gained its independence was totally secular (top leader Nehru was openly agnostic), with a scientific temper, highly educated, far from being Hindu Supremacists. Due to this good luck India became the world's marvel of a democracy and not a theocratic State even though its large majority of population was not literate for many decades. The Constituent Assembly also must deserve immense credit for producing a constitution, though it was a huge copy paste of the British Government Act of 1935 and American constitution ("We the people.." of 1787 vintage), that was both good and bad. Good because it helped India stay a FLAWED BUT FUNCTIONAL DEMOCRACY with well defined principles of separation of power among the four pillars of governance architecture- Legislature, Judiciary, Executive and Press. Bad because it is NOT FLEXIBLE ENOUGH to empower the local governments, as their capacities build up, to the extent it is necessary. It is bad because it PREVENTS ENTRY OF SMART AND HONEST people to occupy positions of power because it requires black money to contest and win elections. The top leaders from Nehru onwards until Manmohan Singh respected the architecture. But after Modi took over in 2014, this architecture is under great stress and it has already cracked up significantly - yet its covert and even overt subversion is in progress, egged on by Modi's cult followers and retreat of political opponents and dissidents who are being blackmailed, bought-over through money power or jailed through abuse of both state institutions and Judiciary .
There is little doubt India would have become a Hindu Pakistan by now, if back then in 1940s, it had the misfortune of having leaders of the RSS variety whose mission is to create a Hindu Rashtra. Modi had been a hard core full-time RSS pracharak before becoming a successful politician - expectedly, he is an obscurantist ("ancient Hindus could transplant an Elephant head onto a human"), uneducated (his declaration in the affidavit filed to ECI has not been investigated despite charges of it being a fake MA in "Entire Political Science"), narrow minded (uses official machinery to visit and inaugurate only Hindu temples never a mosque or Church or Gurudwara - mocks Western educated economists or ignores English speaking journalists), inward looking ("Atmanirbhar Bharat" and many such slogans) and a Hindu Supremacist (his jibe to Muslims - "Hum panch hamare pachcheese" while visiting a relief camp of 2002 riots, - a Muslim ghetto which he called a "child producing factory" - says it all). Modi has been labeled as the "Divider-in-Chief" by the Time Magazine because of his expertise in polarising the society.
What is the future for India?
Unless the 63% who didn't vote for BJP formations under Modi in 2019 General Elections, consolidate themselves and expand their influence by uniting in opposition to BJP, and defeating it in 2024 General Elections, India's decline (Aakar Patel, in his book Price of the Modi Years, has listed 49 out of 53 Key Performance Indicators in which Modi Government has shown a NEGATIVE TREND) will accelerate and it will turn into a Hindu Pakistan with similar poor economic performance. The potential of Indians to progress and lead the world will be compromised and India will fall below the important global average progress parameters - in terms of economy, education and health. India will cease to be a secular state and it could even disintegrate.
At present India is struggling to remain a secular non-theocratic state with its declining rankings of democratic freedoms - freedom of expression, press freedom and so on. As Romila Thapar says, the current dispensation believes in the discarded TWO-NATION theory advanced by James Mill in his book published in 1817 - History of British India - that said the Muslim India and Hindu India are two nations in a constant state of conflict.
Sans Hindu Supremacists, India's future is bright. Indians are great innovators. With 100 unicorns and dozens of top global CEOs Indians can lead the world eventually. What works for Indians is the spirit of fighting difficult odds. Many MNCs are setting up GCCs in India. IBM and Accenture have lacs of employees in India. India produces world's maximum number of STEM graduates and pretty soon doctors and medics too. If independent quality testing institutions are set up and foreign collaboration (and FDI) allowed for foreign Universities, Digital Health Mission given a push and local Governments empowered, India's growth potential can be realised much faster than Ruchir Sharma has forecast.
Kaushik Basu compliments India's founding fathers.. why?
15-Aug-22 Indian Army recorded this rendition of a little girl in the East
At the highest battlefield in the world..
2022 One song 75 Artistes Jaya Hey 2.0 - full five verses of the original song of which only the first one constitutes the National Anthem. Read the description afterwards!
2010 Phir Mile Sur
1988 Mile Sur Mera Tumhara - original - Lyricist - Piyush Pandey
14-Aug-22 IE P Chidambaram - How much of a sovereign Republic are the Indian people? Not just the Government, the people also must be free in a true sovereign Country. Will we remain so by 2047?
6-Aug-22 Ruchir Sharma interviewed by Prannoy Roy
India's economic progress in 75 years - in charts and succinctly explained. India has progressed considerably but so has the world. India ranks only in the bottom 25 percentile globally in terms of per capita income..
Brilliant analysis here.
Unless economic freedom improves, it will be 18 years before India's per capita income doubles!
14-Aug-22 Caste system is the hall mark of Hindu religion and it is alive and kicking in a "secular" India. RSS claims to best define the Hindu Rashtra. Religion causes brain damage: RSS school teacher commits atrocity in Rajasthan..
Dalit boy, 9 years old, beaten for touching pot of drinking water reserved for the teacher, dies
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Nehru's all time great speech.. At the stroke of midnight..
27-May-22 Rahul Gandhi tweets about Nehru's relevance today.
14-Aug-22 Manmohan Singh writes in The Hindu / Business Line - hard won freedoms must be protected ..
15-Aug-22 PM's one-hour speech from the Red Fort
15-Aug-47 Nehru's speech from the Red Fort
16-Aug-22 The Wire Ramachandra Guha interview by Karan Thapar. RG says India@75 is reduced to a 30:70 democracy from a 50:50 India@65 democracy it was. He laments that earlier we could claim that at least the elections were honoured but now even that is not possible to claim - in many big states BJP has toppled the elected governments with the money power - buying over MLAs with allegedly the rate of Rs.40 Cr to 50 Cr per MLA. Earlier the State institutions were not so independent but now even Judiciary has become a part of the executive.
Modi cult is without a parallel in the history of the world - leadership cult has never been good for any country - it wasn't so for Libya, Cuba, Italy, Germany or China and it won't be so for India.
17-Aug-22 ET Op Ed by TK Arun- biggest failures of our "democracy" - two examples cited - Salman Rushdie's case and Indra, the 9-year old Dalit boy who died after being beaten up the upper caste teacher's whose "reserved pot of water" he had touched. These failures are:
i) State respects and displays timidity before claims of "religious hurt" and
ii) State abdicates it's responsibility to uphold equality of all, regardless of caste, in practice and sensibilities and leaves it to religion to sort out the violations.
