A nation of tokenism

Let us recall some more recent cases of criminal oversight connived at since it suited everybody. The first instance is the whole sordid episode of Kargil. To blame it on just the Army would be grossly unfair: our intelligence agencies have a role and responsibility that were obviously not discharged. But did anyone get sacked? No. We do not ever punish the powerful; we do, however, always manage to find ways to punish the weak.

We chose to make martyrs of our soldiers and rightly so but, in all that emotional drama, we did not pause to examine why it all happened and who should get the rap. An inquiry report on Kargil is out but so are the people responsible. No one has been made accountable, no one punished, no one smeared. What happens finally is that one army officer gets transferred.

We lost several innocent lives in Kargil. Those who died were doing more than defending India: they were also defending the inept, the callous and the weak who in effect rule this country. Those soldiers were sacrificial lambs and media fodder. If anyone benefited from it all, it was the media which saw its ratings climb and circulation go up and the politician who used this to drum up votes. I still remember how every day, politicians would jostle with each other to be present at ceremonies meant to honour our brave. They were and always have been parasites on time: they proved themselves beyond all measure yet again.

Uphaar was a tragedy that should have never happened. Involved were some very powerful people, but no one seems to be accountable. One is not suggesting that justice is non-existent: it may exist in court-rooms but not in the homes of those who saw their families wiped out because of some oversight on the part of owners and managers of that cinema hall. Every June, a memorial service is held for those who perished: the media picks it up for two days before and after that service and then all is forgotten.

Kandahar, the third instance, was a case of mishandling that must take the ca-ke. A frozen nation watched an inept dra-ma being played out on a neighbouring tarmac. We lost a life, created a widow and then claimed victory. The most demeaning thing was to send our Foreign Minister with a bunch of hardcore terrorists to free the hostages. There could have been no greater admission of failure than that. So what happened after Kandahar? The usual noises were made about an inquiry commission and so on. In a typically babu-like reaction, we have now stopped all Indian Airlines flights to Nepal: creati-ng a different kind of inconvenience!

From all this, it seems this country is not being run at all: it’s running on its own momentum. Do we, as a nation, possess any pride of citizenship? Do we as a nation wish to find the causes of the tragedies that befall the people? Do we ever take the common man into confidence? Orissa continues to be dogged by the problems of a Chief Minister who can’t speak the language of his people. We have a golf-loving CM who would much rather play his 18 holes while the Valley burns. We have an octogenarian CM who after decades of power `wishes’ to step down.

On Kargil, the inquiry report is in and what do we do about it? Nothing. We have become a nation of tokenism. We take token measures: Chelsea for Holi, Jaswant Singh going to Kandahar, steps taken in Jammu and Kashmir despite an inept government. The soul has gone out of everything we do.

Our ministers are busy with inauguration speeches and our bureaucrats with attempts to run the country, while our police make farcical breakthroughs and then we all get excited. Look at the content of our news channels; it is finally all about tokenism.

I wish to know when the people responsible for Uphaar are going to jail. What really happened in the BMW case? Who is responsible for making Ashok Agarwal the monster he actually became? But I promise you there will be no answers. Certainly, not from our politicians who live from election to election. So who cares if at all? Is it the media? No it can’t be since it’s busy replacing editorial sanctity with power-peddling. Not the bureaucrat, since he is busy saving his skin or trying to get the next promotion.

So where do the Katyals go when they wish to argue their case for a life lost in va-in? They meet the US President, not the Indian Prime Minister! Where does that paralysed soldier, defending the peaks, now in Ahmedabad, go? Nowhere. He just gets a local paper to report his plight but nothing will come of it since the Army HQs only gets to read the papers that in any case don’t find Kargil newsworthy any more!

If you have seen the real India, you will be ashamed. You will never forgive yourself for being tolerant of inept people. For electing the kind of people we have in Parliament today. We shy away from all responsibility and yet I believe each one of us is responsible for betraying the trust of a fellow-Indian in no matter what we do. We have become too tolerant and those who run this country are taking advantage of us. They will continue to do so relentlessly. It is no surprise that our media drops the stories that it chooses to; that you have media barons who are more spirituality-driven than cause-driven; or that they believe in the cult of amnesia rather than in raking up inconvenient issues.

If there is something that we have lost over the years, it is the ability to inspire: to inspire ourselves to reach out to the last blue mountain, and our fellow-citizens to raise a protest over something not quite right. We need to get our voice back, or we shall perish as a nation.