Half a freedom

In a one-room hovel in Mumbai, just before Independence Day, I met a family that despite gaping holes in the tin roof, despite no clean water, despite having to cook beside the single bed had aspirations to a standard of living. All five children went to school, their hair neatly oiled and their clothes clean and carefully pressed. Between them the Jadhav family owned two mobile phones, a gas cooker and a small colour TV and the children said they would like to get jobs that made them lots of money so they could live one day in a proper house. Twenty years ago such aspirations did not exist in the slums of Mumbai and Kolkata.

Other things have changed for the better. Better roads, better public transport, better television, better consumer goods, better telecommunications, better cars, better chances of a good life. But, there is still more bad news than good and unless we acknowledge this it will be India’s 66th birthday and we will still be wondering why — so many years after the British Raj stopped exploiting us — we continue to be counted among the poorest countries in the world. Poverty, like some hideous, incurable disease, afflicts not just chronically poor states like Bihar and Orissa but even supposedly progressive ones like Karnataka. Recently, I drove from Hubli to Bagalkot and it was like driving through a wasteland.

Barren fields, dwellings of thatch and mud, human beings so stunted with malnutrition they spent their time gazing vacantly into space. The 21st century manifested itself only in the plastic bags that clung to the few dusty bushes that dared grow in this desolate landscape.

During the three-hour drive, along one of the worst roads in India, I saw only one teashop and one consumer commodity: water. In bazaars bereft of even the most basic shops young men pushed wheelbarrows with plastic urns carrying water they had brought from far away. We can no longer blame the British Raj or colonisation for this unacceptable, sickening poverty. We have to blame our political leaders and when we begin to talk about them the festive spirit really begins to fade. Look only at the choices you will have at the next general election and you see a landscape more bleak than the Karnataka wasteland I just described.

If we vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party and pals we have a bunch of tired old men trying to flog us tired old ideas and tired old gods. If we vote for Congress and pals we have our first prime minister of European origin leading a bunch of tired old Lefties with little left to say. Hence deadlock in Parliament these days on a daily basis. The field is open for anyone with the courage to start a new political party that talks of development and prosperity instead of temples and secularism. We need politicians who recognise that the issues of the 21st century are healthcare, education and the environment and not ideology or mythology.

We need political leaders who acknowledge that our democracy has been flawed. We have had political freedom — if it means anything to an illiterate, destitute populace — but economic totalitarianism. And, because totalitarianism of any kind eventually fails we are currently at a point when the old system is falling apart but those who fed off it refuse to let go because without it they are nothing.

Where will they get the money to put in Swiss accounts? How will they buy their children expensive foreign educations? If the government leaves business and commerce to the private sector and concentrates on building infrastructure — both social and physical — and on administrative reform we could be better off by our 57th ‘‘tryst’’ but who will make the drastic changes required? And, without drastic change we cannot even begin to think of an India where every child goes to school, every village has access to clean water and healthcare and every Indian household has at least enough electricity to run a single fan and light.

Political friends routinely berate me for never seeing the upside, for not seeing that the glass is half full and not half empty. I do see that, what I do not see is why it should be only half full. What I do not see is why our taxes should pay to support politicians and officials who aspire only to half filling the glass and yet boast about how we are on the verge of becoming an economic superpower. How? What I do not see either is why my taxes should pay for our officials to travel to foreign countries on ‘‘study tours’’ that do not even teach them that countries much poorer than ours have gone much further ahead because they have understood that what matters are not resources but good economic policies. Fifty-six years after Independence is a good time to demand a full glass.

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com