Where did you and I go wrong? 

We did go wrong somewhere. All is not lost, reclaiming India is still possible. Thanks for reminding us of the dire situation Shantanu.

Anupam

Kindly read this article:

http://news.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/columnists/jawed-naqvi-has-the-freemarket-mantra-corroded-indias-democracy-090

A small quote:
“There was a time when Indian ministers were cited as examples of probity. With committed activist-politicians like Feroze Gandhi keeping vigil, scams were unearthed promptly and punishments meted out instantly. Nehru’s cabinet minister Rao Shiv Bahadur Singh was jailed as early as in 1949 for accepting a mere 25,000 rupees for forging a mining document.

In 1958, Finance Minister T. T. Krishnamachari resigned for helping place state-owned insurance funds with a private banker. The businessman, Haridas Mundra, was jailed. Other tycoons were punished with regularity those days. In 1959, Ramakrishna Dalmia, head of Bharat Insurance Company, was jailed for two years for misappropriating 22 million rupees from the company. Businessman Dharam Teja siphoned 220 million rupees for a spurious shipping company. He was arrested in Europe and jailed for six years. The father of the current chief minister of Orissa was forced to resign for favouring his own company in awarding a government contract. That was the system which today is denounced variously as populist, socialist and inefficient.”

Well said!
Burqa Dutt and Freak Sanghvi have been bailed out by their own.But who leaked the tapes to the press?The audios would not open on Jhunjhunwala’s blog or the Open mag site, but had spread far and wide on other sites. There are games within games. Sanghvi has put a rebuttal already on the internet.

Very Good question Shantanu…..

India lost out politically after the death of Lal Bahaur Shstri, because politics after that irrespective of political parties was devoid of people with commitment to transperency. BUT more importantly i woudl blame the society, because the politicians are a mere cross section of the society itself.

I would blame the generations of men and women who were in their teens or in their middle age during 60s to 2000s – because this is the set of people who from our society did not build on the values and ethos thats governed the founding fathers of Indian independence.

I should say here, Congress party should take the a big chunk of the blame for seeing that they were not effective in stopping rot that crept into implementation of government policies.

I read somehwere Narendra Modi commenting “If only Rajiv Gandhi, not just identified that the system was wrong, but did something to stem the rot India would have been a better place” – i think i largely agree with Narendra Modi here (i dont agree with Modi most of the times)… was this because Rajiv was held by a cotrie of Congress leaders like Arun Nehru? or He just could not break the shackles of the nexus between politicians and the bureacracy!
Note: I am not holding Rajiv gandhi alone responsible, but the entire political system and post 1960s till date. More importantly i am holding the society mainly responsible.

How do you measure ethos and values? In gms of gold? or in tons of grains? What is the colour of those values? What is the volume? Are values same for all people? Can they be traded? Is there an ISI standard that describes them?

There we go. Shantanu asked a very relevant question. Then we have one completely denying the question. Then there comes one who posts a completely irrelevant article from a known India baiter to prove that Indian liberalization is the only responsible point and everything was hunky-dory during the socialist rule when applying for a phone connection used to take one year even if you are living in one of the metro cities.

Shantanu,
as far as I can see we went wrong in two places primarily: the complete lack of accountability in the bureaucracy/government machinery and a strange obsession with socialism. Both are long standing diseases in our system. Why do we call them disease? Because that is what they are. Our democracy depends on three pillars – judiciary, executive and legislative. Let us have a look at them.

The judiciary still thinks that it is a colonial system. The system that British established was not changed a bit. Perhaps it was not co-incidental that even today in our warm country, lawyers/judges still have to dress exactly the way they dress in British court to argue on a case. It shows our bankruptcy in independent thinking or the lack of courage in deviating from the norms set by colonial masters. But I digress. Because judiciary could not get over the colonial hangover, it could not bring itself to function like a branch that is supposed to be effective in delivering justice to the people. So judges still follow the same work habit they used to follow during British rule and cases, specially the ones against the government, kept piling up. So the courts failed to provide the mechanism necessary for applying constitution supported checks and balances – exactly something that the judiciary was mandated to provide. So when government machinery saw that there is no way an individual can challenge them, they thought that they can get away with anything. The fact that our system does not have a clear border between executive and legislative branches quickened this corrosion of the governmental system and in certain cases, legislative branch helped formulating the laws that would help the corrupt or delay the punishment against them ( http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/6290/A+lot+to+hide.html ). This resulted in politician-babu nexus (like Indira Gandhi-PN Haksar-IK Gujral nexus, the list is very long). The most elite universities whose job was to supply candidates for IFS/IAS (and members of Saturday club in Delhi) were controlled by government anyway so eventually their own alumnis began to control them around 70s and 80s. This opened the door for further nepotism. Because these universities supplied so-called “intellectuals” in media and government sponsored white elephants (i.e. “research institutes” as some call them), the nexus is expanded to politician-babu-intellectual-media opinion makers. The ultimate height of this nexus is creation and management of JNU. Just look at this list as a short who’s-who: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawaharlal_Nehru_University#Prominent_alumni
Every one from Prakash Karat (alumni) and Manmohan Singh (as a faculty) is involved. This completed the elitist circle of the “people-like-us” where “aam admi” has no place.

Talking about the nature of this circle, this is a left-dominated circle from the start because that is what the founders intended it to be. This is the single most reason why most Indians (specially the old generation) romanticises with left socialism. This romanticism achieved this effect: branding any enterpreneur as a class enemy (and enemy of the poor) and discouraging business environment. When you remove all business from the environment then the biggest business you are left with is government. It is only natural that every Indian is obsessed with getting a “government naukri”. Discouraging businesses also ensured that competition be taken out from the market. This resulted in cronyism and incompetency at the top level of old businesses. This in turn ensured that good management policies and improvement of corporate administration is thrown out of the window. But this is nothing if one understands how socialism-inspired regulation helped corruption. Story exists about a top level bureaucrat who used to write policies related to export-import regulation in the day and wrote big explanation for these policies in the night (presumably because policies were hard to interpret). Now, would you call such a bureaucrat as incompetent or corrupt? Damn, no. But definitely misdirected. Socialism helped hard-working people to create over-zealous regulation which both low-level regulators as well as business men found hard to implement. Most of these regulations were disconnected from reality too. For example, most of us know that for each road there is a specification on how heavy a particular vehicle would be? How many roads do you know that such restrictions are clearly written? If it is not clear, then how do you think transport companies can get away without paying bribe? License raj helped create extreme level of corruption among regulators and business men like Dhirubhai Ambani merely exploited that corrupt regime. In the name of promoting socialism all independent institutions were taken out and government expanded it’s tentacles everywhere. If you have time, do watch an italian film called “Gomorah”. Based on a real story, it is about a city in Italy where mafia took control of every sphere of society. Watching the film I found an eerie similarity with India’s governance based on philosophy of socialism. Today no single entity need to protect socialism, it is mixed within our cultural gene so well that we do excellent job of undermining our own benifit in the name of socialism. Think about this: even today in private sector it is a taboo to say (in your job interview) that you are doing your job to make money. What a hipocrisy!!!

Where do we want to go from here? Rollabck government tentacles to begin with and ensure speedy judegement in the judiciary. Few spectacular punishment of the corrupt would set the corrupt-wannabes in the right path. Do not protect business, protect competition and there will be jobs and more robust economy relying on internal demand instead of export fuelled hyper-activity. The list of medicines is not very long, but hard to swallow until another crisis arrive.

@Chandra,
What you said is true. But here is the same problem from another angle. India and most other countries which take public education seriously has to roll out a “factory” education system. In this system, the entire process of learning has to be standardised and everyone coming through this process must adhere to minimal standard. This is like an assembly line, there is no scope of developing questioning attitude or individual talents in this system as special attention can not be made a norm. As democracy is perfected, there is a demand to spread this system and thus the minimal standard is lowered till everyone is comfortable that their own child can pass through the net defined by the system. It is not just us, any country who follows the system has suffered. Think of “No Child Left Behind” in Bush’s regime. At that time, I have heard similar criticism against it.

Personally, I believe developing inquisitive temperament is like developing expertise in various branches of academia, only a tiny portion is interested in doing so. That is the only percentage that break free. But then if countries all are suffering from this factory system. But then why America rules in the fields of patents? Why is western education considered superior. IMHO, it actually is. The reason is, westerners have long accepted the truth that factory education eventually implies that higher education is a business which will use the output of the factory, reject the material that can not be moulded and use the rest to create better patent-producing material. Better patent producing material does not mean better education but it does help the respective nation and it is one of the measures of the performance of higher education system. The acceptance of this rule largely allowed them to introduce competition in the higher studies and take out government subsidy. In our case, we have not accepted the truth. The result is fat cat university departments which does not care if their courses are sought after by the market or not, if the research they are “doing” has any relevance in real world or not. Ask them to manage their own budget and you will see that those who would survive would promote better people. But that is not going to happen, because “everybody need higher education”. Really!!! The poor fellow who used to contact me for giving personal loans every alternate day, is a MA in history. Did he ever need that degree?

As for history, I agree totally. But it is not just the problem with history. Look at geography, we are made to read Pakistan’s geography, but are you aware that there is a place in Meghalaya where you have the biggest annual rainfall and what it means for alternate energy. As someone who has wasted four years of his life in engineering college I can testify that certain branches of engineering are only attractive to most students because whatever is offered in standard courses does not get applied in real life (or already obsolete as in Electronics) so students do not have to study except the night before exam. It is dismal.

Having worked as an academic before moving on to the industry, I had closely collaborated on projects with some of the academics of my alma-mater (IITB). At best, IITs can be called as excellent teaching shops that create “teaching assistants” who are in great demand in the US. And relieve the US academics from teaching to conduct their research.

But we are digressing here. Shantanu’s post was about “Where did we go wrong ” ? We all know on several fronts and we could spend the rest of our life time in pontificating on the past.

I believe that to expect an uprising or a revolution is extremely remote. There is no single leader in the horizon who commands such a mass following. Given the multitude of problems we see in India in all walks of life, one solution is grow organically. Each one of us, who cares for the future of our country, vows to become a center of excellence in our respective field and actively promotes the vision that we see for our country. This could attract others and soon we have a critical mass of like-minded individuals.

@Chandra (#18),
I believe that to expect an uprising or a revolution is extremely remote. There is no single leader in the horizon who commands such a mass following.
There have been such popular leaders before. Yet their popularity produced nothing. Think of the popularity enjoyed by JP Narayan in early seventies or NT Rama Rao or Rajiv Gandhi@1984. JP was mis-directed with his obsession of socialism. As for NTR or Rajiv, I do not suspect their personal integrity (in Rajiv’s case at least his initial years), sycophants quickly ensured that they get all the benefit of absolute power. MK Gandhi was, by any measure, most popular leader of the independent India. Look at the India that his close circle of politicians produced. India was even denied her original name. This is also the reason, I fear for Bihar now that Nitish got more than absolute majority.
If there would be a change, it has to be done incrementally. Yet, I have a feeling that whatever is being done, is done too little too late.