Hope deferred and longing for the Tree of Life.

                                                         Hope deferred and longing for the Tree of Life.

             Ten months have gone. The BJP government with its thunderous majority has been in the saddle of governance. Political analysts will converge on TV studios to rate the PM on his 300 days achievements.  There will be statistical analysis sampling 10-12 thousand people across the nation, though for a non statistical mind like mine, such a small number out of a whopping 814million eligible voters  makes it difficult to accept that  this Is  the Voice of India.  As an aam admi – R.K.laxman’s ‘common man’ – I speak on the basis of what I have experienced over the last few months after the new Government had taken over. Like the cigarette packets that come with a statutory warning ( the wisdom of carrying such a warning is now  being questioned) , I wish to sound a prefatory warning that this assessment is purely subjective and I have neither the stature nor the skill to present it as though India has spoken. 

             In these ten months has there been any positive change in the lives of the people, in anticipation of which they had voted the BJP (and its allies that go by the three words NDA) to power? Has there been any thing to affirm pre-election promises with post-election reality? Have ‘the promised “achche din” come? Has the stashed away black money in foreign countries been brought back? Has every Indian got a credit of 15lakhs in his account within one hundred days of BJP coming to power from the seizure of that black money as promised by the PM -designate of that time in his pre-election speeches? Has crime against women abated? Have law and order been restored and fewer crimes are committed? Have the prices come down? Has the foreign policy raised our international stature? Have our neighbours discovered that India is now less of a Big Brother and more of an equable neighbour? Have we now forged strong “alignment policy” swinging with the Chinese President and  hugging the US  President,  shaking hands with the Japanese and simultaneously warming up to the Russians, embracing Pakistan on the one hand and seeking Israel’s friendship on the other, wooing Srilanka despite its covert activities of swooping on Indian fishermen and terrorising the Tamils in the island nation ? Is the nation resounding with new bhai-bhai slogans - something akin to ( even if it sounds anathema to BJP ears) the Nehruvian non-alignment policy of pleasing all and pleasing none?

             All the pre-election promises have been nothing but vacuous rhetoric. There has been not a drop of the promised manna that was promised before elections to fall from a divine government. The promises were made at the right time when people were disappointed with  soaring inflation and a supine, prostrate, toothless, scam-scarred government (that had the added discomfiture of being more sinned against than sinning) though the game changers knew in their heart of hearts that there will be no effective change once they are in power.   

             But since change is the law of nature, there have been some noticeable changes though they may not translate into anything monumental to make a positive difference to the life of the teeming millions of aam admis  like me who dot the Indian nation from North to South, East to West.

             First among the positive changes is there is  no breaking news today on TV about the policies and functioning of various ministries,  in sharp contrast to a leak a day that kept the media censorious  during the UPA/ManmohanSingh’s government. The sound of silence is what the media gets these days and  they anxiously wait for a serving Minister or MP or a member of the BJP and its affiliates to commit a bloomer to latch onto it for their prime time  Big debates on the news channels. The plugging of the leakage in the corridors of power has been very effective to starve the media of its staple diet of sensational revelations. There is no room today for Assanges and Wikileakers (including Savukku Shankar, our home grown Assange who released the 2G tapes) to spring up with revelations-truthful or sensational.

             With the Big Brother watching, the PMO office keeps an eye on all the ministers so that they are hardly seen or heard. The media is singing the chorus from the Skyliners : “Where have they gone?/All the summers we knew/ all the winters we shared/ Where have they gone?” In the previous regime the PM(MMS)  was silent while all the PM’s men indulged in a petulant running debate both within their party and with the world outside through the media.  Today the PM(Narendra Damodardas Modi or simply NDM)is silent on controversial issues that his ministers and party ideologues make, though with a halo of a rockstar, he speaks in foreign lands and his oratory is hailed all over the world while back home, his Mann Ki Baat over radio, the poor cousin of TV is the monthly fare for his own countrymen.

             The third change is the change in the holiday list. Gandhji’s birthday was observed not as a holiday but a Swachh Bharat day. Christmas was observed as Good Governance Day. The government employees –reverentially known as ‘the Babus’ who used to enjoy holidays commemorating birth and death anniversaries of big and small netas  besides festivals of all religions, had their first shock when they were denied these two holidays. They were asked to come to their offices with broom or a pen in hand on these two days.  It is yet to be seen if in the list of holidays for the current year 2015, these two holidays have been  deleted. It will also be interesting if the government comes out with new tags for every festival (including the Indian festivals provided RSS does not scream) to make them specific activities days and set an example to the world that “ We are Indians; we need no holidays”.

             Swachh Bharat campaign replacing Gandhi Jayanti with flashing brooms on spotless clean roads was a neat way of paying homage to the Father of the Nation.  The photo-op sessions were recorded for posterity. Colleges and schools have printed the picture of this day in their brochures and annual magazines. For once on this day, the black top roads in Delhi were visible in all their tarred glory without an iota of dust. The Industrialists and businessmen suddenly remembered that they had Corporate Social Responsibility to discharge and came  up with ideas of dotting the entire map of India with toilets to make Swachh bharat. No one ever wondered about water for the toilets. Ten months have not seen any visible change. The red spits continue on the road and on the walls, the litters are everywhere and the defecation on compound walls (including those that have picture tiles of Ganesh and Lakshmi to act as deterrent from polluting the walls) are as rampant as before. No amount of foreign branded perfumes and deodorants can wash away the foul odour that permeates the Delhi office corridors, the markets , the colleges and schools. Has the mindset of Indians changed as a result of our PM’s much advertised initiative for a changed Swachh bharat?  The NRIs who had applauded the Great Indian initiative of the PM during his address in the Madison Square Garden have come and gone holding their fingers to their nose.  The present stand-off between the AAP government in Delhi state and the BJP government at the Centre raises a pertinent question as to who should wield the broom and who should hold the purse string? In the absence of a clear answer, the unpaid striking broom wielders are sweeping the garbage on to the road to make Delhi the stinking capital of the world.

             What goes up and does not come down? One need not be erudite or educated to answer this question. Even the beggar on the streets holding an emaciated child on her arms and followed by three to four semi starved children has the answer to it. There has been very little attempt to cash on the bonus of oil prices coming down. It looks as though unlike the MMS government that took the full brunt of the phenomenal increase in oil prices and global economic recession, the current economic status seems to paradoxically resemble the snake and the ladder game, where even as the oil prices come down, the prices of everyday consumable commodities scale up the ladder. The inflation has not been arrested at the consumer level though there might have been some reduction in the WPI-wholesale price index. I pay 6 rupee per banana, 12rupees for an orange, not less than 50-60 rupees per kilo of any seasonal vegetable and 68-70 rupees for a litre of milk. The prospect of El Nino playing havoc with this year’s monsoon is worrisome. If autumn, winter and spring prices have spiralled, can monsoon -dry summer prices be far behind?

             Despite all the encouragement for “make in India’,  the cost-pull inflation and demand-supply inflation may retard economic growth and fuel further unemployment- again defeating the very promises that the  PM had made prior to the elections. There has been no visible change in the economic state of the aam admi. Marginally there is cheer for big businessmen and industrialists, but in an overall analysis no positive impact has been there for even the salaried middle class. 

            The other change is a sudden leap into religious fraction that hardly made headlines during the last so many years. After the devastating partition soon after independence, the deadliest violence in recent times has been the Gujarat riots in 2002. That is nearly twelve years behind us. But today there is so much bizarre talk about Love Jihad, Ghar Wapsi, and even about Bharat Ratna-cum-Nobel recipient Mother Teresa to make one wonder why another crusade is being contemplated and this time between Christianity and Hinduism while simultaneously stoking the simmering communal flame between Islam and Hinduism.  The churches are attacked and vandalized. Where is our PM’s clarion call of “ sabke saath, sabka vikas” if such a polarization in the name of religion is actively pursued? The flare up in UP and West Bengal leading to destruction and several deaths have thrown open fissures for communal volcano to erupt all over the country. The secular doctrine that was the founding principle of our Constitution is vilified as ‘sickular’ and there is a clamour to revisit anti- conversion bill that tugs at the constitutional freedom guaranteeing citizen’s right to his faith and his religion. The PM has been trying to soften the communal blows by feeble attempts to rein in the strident fundamentalists in his party, but they seem to be falling on deaf ears.

             Violence against women continues unabated and newspapers fill their cover page with stories of rape, crime and robbery. The headlines during the pre-poll days carried vignettes of PM’s speeches about development. But in a reverse way, the dailies today do not have much to report about development. May be forty weeks is too short a period for any development to be visible. Many projects are in the pipeline but they depend upon the Parliament’s assent to the land Bill whereby lands could be acquired and infrastructures developed for big projects. The land bill makes it easy and profitable for big business to acquire lands from the poor farmer who is asked to part with his meager possession and is  promised compensation of a better life and better employment in lieu of his hard work on the land. It is a catch 22 situation- without land there will be no development and no easing of unemployment. But for the farmer, this is more of a diminishing return to whatever little he had possessed. The PM and his men and women may come up with new strategies to balance farmer’s plight with better economic growth and welfare.

             Good governance, a key promise at the time of election when there was a paralysis of governance has not made any spectacular jump in these months. Maybe there is a little less corruption in high places but corruption is endemic to our people and this is not easy to be wished away. Are the files moving? Has punctuality been put in place?  The online biometric fingerprint attendance system has been tampered with in many offices. The bureaucrats have their own sense of timing that may be at variance with the PM’s and his minister’s intended pace.  Educational policies are more in the nature of eulogizing our ancient wisdom and an insistent return to our roots when we have to spread our branches and make flowers bloom and fruits ripen. There is much talk about our past knowledge about reproductive genetics, cosmetic surgery, flying planes etc without understanding the basic difference between science and technology. The ancient Hindus must have worked on many scientific theories that hold possibility of practical value but it is technology that applied those theories to make new products and inventions available to human society, industrial arts, commercial products and engineering instruments. The application of knowledge for practical ends has been developed and achieved by technology. Hope the new Government does not fight shy of the Western advancements in science and technology, medicine and engineering and build on it with our pride in our ingenuity.

             The foreign policy has not brought any great dividends. Pakistan continues to snipe, Srilanka bans Indian fishermen from coming near its waters, China refuses to yield on border disputes. The recent religious conversions have figured in the Western and European opinions about India and that too not on any flattering term.  It is not enough for a mesmeric talker like our PM to inject vitality to our international relationship, it is also equally incumbent on his partymen and on all of us to resist the practice of cultural and religious atavism. It is time we remember that we have an obligation to cultivate humanity, so succinctly phrased in Sanskrit as Vasudeva Kutumbakam.

              So has there been any change? Not much to gloat or exult, not little to despair and disappointed. The truth is this vast country with a wide disparity in terms of religion, caste, literacy,social and economic status, with people speaking in different languages and following different beliefs , is not easy to govern. It is one thing to hold promise of a Ram Rajya to get to the seat of power,  but it is far more difficult to knit the country where we balance homogeneity in terms of being an Indian with  heterogeneity in terms of our diversity. No single party has a magic wand to swing to bring this balance and so it is the responsibility of every Indian irrespective of his party affiliation and ideology to work together to arrive at the Nehruvian call for Unity in Diversity. Three hundred days are just a beginning. There will be another five times of three hundred days to come. Let us hope changes are there for the better. As the Bible says “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick, but desire fulfilled is a tree of life”(Porverb 13:12)