India empowered to me is…

India is an old civilisation but a modern state. Yet, have we been able to evolve a common citizenry in the past 50 years? No. Rather, there is a trend towards segregating our citizens into ethnic groups, regional identities, castes, communities and genders.

OUR Constitution provides for affirmative discrimination as a limited measure to undo historical deficit. What was conceived as a measure to empower marginalised groups has degenerated into electoral strategy. Worse, this segregation has become a dominant theme in our political discourse.

The objective of evolving a common citizenry has long been lost. Our people have been defined in terms of their primordial and parochial identities.

Even after 50 years, we have not been able to resolve the paradox between equality before the law and the need for affirmative discrimination. We have not been able to synergise social justice with a universally inclusive polity. Till we do not, we shall not be able to evolve as a common citizenry.

After 50 years of independence, have we empowered all sections of society? Are Dalits fully empowered? If so, then why do they still need reservations in educational institutions, for jobs or even to get elected?

When the Constitution ensures no discrimination on the basis of gender, why are women are not equally represented in our elected bodies? Why do they have to take to the streets for equal participation in Parliament? Why were the 73rd and 74th amendments needed to reserve seats and empower one million women?

It is an artificial democracy, sans legitimacy, if it does not reflect the aspirations of half the population, women.

Our democracy is not tolerant of disagreement. My experience in the Rajya Sabha has shown there is little tolerance of different viewpoints. Debates have been derailed by diatribes.

The best rule of thumb we should adopt is to ensure space and tolerance for dissenting voices. Alternative points of views must be available to people, particularly the weakest. Let us give them a stake in our democracy. Let us respect the minority view.

OUR democracy is still not fully participatory. Do elected representatives interact with the electorate? Political parties should be fora for people’s participation. However, most have been reduced to private firms or family businesses.

But things will change. India, with its huge young population, is becoming restive. Modern media is the finest example of synergy between knowledge, technology and democratisation. In modern times, these are the three sources of power. And India has all three in abundance.

Letting a million entrepreneurs bloom
THE Indian economy has managed an annual average growth rate of five to six per cent since the reforms of 1991. Interestingly, there were legitimate expectations of a higher growth rate premised on reforms on the administrative front going hand in hand with economic reforms.

Administrative reforms in terms of review of administrative laws and regulations, repeal of archaic provisions and rules, simplification of government procedures, speedy dispensation of justice, single-window clearances, e-governance were to pave the way for a citizen-friendly administration.

This, as it turned out, was a stillborn project, with the bureaucracy playing midwife! It should therefore not be a surprise that the ‘‘procedural’’ costs of doing business in India continue to remain high.

A recent report, Doing Business in 2006: Creating Jobs — ranks India a dismal 116th of 155 countries in terms of ‘‘ease of doing business’’.

The survey finds that in India it takes 11 steps and 71 days to launch a business. Licensing and permit requirements take 20 steps and 270 days. Export formalities take 36 days, 10 documents and 22 signatures. Those for imports take 43 days, 15 documents and 27 signatures. There are 59 taxes a medium-sized company has to pay or withhold in a year. In case of disputes, it takes 40 procedures and 425 days to enforce commercial contracts!

ADMINISTRATIVE reforms to revamp ‘‘soft infrastructure’’ — government systems, administrative laws, rules, procedures — will play no small role in unleashing the entrepreneurial energy of the youth, leading to many new employment opportunities.

With more than half its population under 25, creating more jobs ought to be a priority for India. And improving the regulatory processes that make it easy to do business is key to creating more jobs.

And so it is that India empowered to me is the blooming of millions of entrepreneurs in the villages, towns and cities across the country. If India is to emerge as the economic superpower of the 21st century, a greater proportion of our youth should seriously consider entrepreneurship as a career option. This will happen only in an environment that encourages and nurtures entrepreneurship.

When the intellectual recognises his role
THERE is no document of civilisation, says Walter Benjamin, that is not somewhere uncivilised and manipulative. For me, an empowered India would mean a country with a socialist thinking that can reach out to millions who have sacrificed, gone hungry, lost dear ones.

It is imperative to keep this fact of our social and economic history in the forefront in order to come to grips with the need to offer resistance to a growing exploitative world. We need to constantly be aware of the threat of terror and explain the reasons behind it, be stronger in our pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace.

I want an India where individualism would differ from socialism or collectivism in claiming that the welfare of the individual is of the utmost value and that each individual exists as a unique end, with society serving only as a means to accomplish the individual requirements.

THE nature and function of the Indian intellectual can be debated only if his critical politics are related to his function and his position in society. All radical work for the transformation of society, so as to put an end to oppression, has to be carried on at the site of his academic or professional activity.

Politics, as is often thought, does not only operate outside the university or one’s workplace. What goes on inside is as political as what goes on in overtly political areas.

In an empowered India the intellectual must go beyond the private, academic or technical terms to the ‘‘public sphere’’, to the sphere of the citizen rather than that of the narrow specialist.

His teaching and research must undermine existing hegemonies and produce an environment that critically looks at received truths. It is then that the intellectual can provoke a collective will for transformation.

A refined political discourse
THE hope of the Father of the Nation to remove ‘‘every tear from every eye’’ and the vision of Jawaharlal Nehru in his ‘‘tryst with destiny’’ speech 58 years ago provide an enduring framework for an empowered India. The resilience of our democracy, a robust constitutional order, a trillion dollar economy and an unshakable resolve of a billion people to bond together in harmonious coexistence confirm our decisive march towards empowerment.

I do believe, however, that the nation’s moral code of Satyamev Jayate and the spirit of nationalism immortalised in Vande Matram must define the national endeavour. No nation can be truly empowered without belief in and commitment to its core values.

We need to create a national ambience in which integrity, intellect and industry are rewarded at all levels and in all disciplines so as to ensure our collective empowerment.

DESPITE significant achievements as a nation, disease, impoverishment, unemployment and illiteracy are our real challenges. These must be confronted and vanquished by according foremost priority to gainful employment for youth, education and basic healthcare for all.

We also need to secure a national consensus on ways to combat terrorism in all its manifestations. These must remain non-negotiable priorities of the nation. They must not be subordinated to partisan impulses.

Civilised discourse on national issues between leaders of political parties is an essential requirement of a healthy and functioning democracy. Unsubstantiated accusations of a personal nature, in an idiom laced with acrimony, do not augur well.

Such political discourse has compromised the functioning of our parliamentary institutions. The strengthening of our democracy in the service of the people of India demands a return to the best traditions of parliamentary democracy established by Nehru. We must, thus, refine our political discourse through the dignity of expression, high imagination, knowledge and intellectual integrity.

Living by the ideals of the national flag
INDIA empowered is a country where the system and the environment help citizens to achieve their full potential and excel in whichever profession they choose — entrepreneur, teacher, social worker, scientist, doctor, sportsperson.

My idea of a truly empowered nation is one in which people work while keeping the country’s best interests in mind. An empowered India is one in which there is absolutely no place for corruption in public life.

India empowered to me is a nation that respects the dignity of labour, and one in which government and the citizens help each other to the best of their capacities, in mutual trust.

It is imperative that to empower ourselves we become increasingly self- reliant rather than depend too much on government. It is essential that people start feeling responsible for the country, rather than play the blame game.

INDIA empowered to me is a country where people display the greatest symbol of our country, our national flag, with dignity and honour. And, most significantly, live by the ideals of the national flag.

India is a nation with astonishing resilience, which is why it has withstood the repeated onslaught of invaders. India has never attacked a country in its history, and I’m confident it never will.

Instead, India has empowered itself with knowledge, a vibrant democracy, stable judiciary and vigilant media. For this reason, it will definitely emerge as an economic superpower. We are faring forward, in the manner that Krishna advised Arjuna to.

Voting for a better future
FOR me, India empowered is when competent and earnest people volunteer to enter politics. And when people compulsorily opt to vote and that too choose deserving representatives for themselves.

Enunciating the idea, the adage ‘‘People get the government they deserve’’ could be referred to in the context of the recent elections in Bihar. There, after 15 years of one-party misgovernance, the people turned around and delivered a decisive mandate. It showed that the people, if they decide, can surmount barriers of caste and community, setting the development agenda. That is true empowerment.

An India without inequality
A country needs capital, technology, foreign direct investment and so on. But they are necessary and not sufficient conditions of development with justice. In any case, they are no substitute to convictions, integrity, and sense of accountability and commitment to nation — that is, the People of India.

It is the material potentials accompanied only by the moral and ethical considerations that make development possible, and also socially equitable. Inequality is anathema to democracy.

Nearly 2,500 years ago, Plato has wisely warned that ‘‘there should exist among citizens neither extreme poverty nor again excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil’’.

State and market in tandem
DOES one judge an empowered India by the size of its nuclear arsenal, a seat on the UN Security Council, by its influence on other countries or other such indicators of state power? Or does one judge an empowered India by the well being and empowerment of its billion people?

I want to argue the case for the latter. And the case rests on a principle of inclusion, political and economic.

We are a political democracy, based on a principle of one person, one-vote. In theory, this should be sufficient to empower all citizens. However, the other side of the political coin, the choice among those we elect, is not quite the same in terms of empowerment or openness.

Political parties in India lack internal democracy. There is little debate within parties. Dissent is often punishable with ‘‘political death’’.

Many candidates are unsuitable to be legislators or parliamentarians. Some are criminals with muscle power. Some have disproportionate money power. And some are simply progeny of politicians whose only qualification is that.

Barriers to entry are thus very high for the genuinely meritorious. People will be genuinely empowered only when these barriers are broken.

WE are now a market economy, or getting there rapidly. Markets are empowering because they bring to people a whole range of new, and better, goods and services. Markets are empowering because they bring opportunities, not just for the privileged, but for many more.

Markets create a culture of merit over all else; caste, religion, region or economic status. Ask Mahendra Singh Dhoni or Irfan Pathan. Or one of the numerous winners of reality shows on television: the tea stall boy who won a nationwide stand-up comedy competition, the young Kashmiri who won a singing competition or the tens of others who have won large sums of money on Kaun Banega Crorepati.

Indeed, one can even ask the former telephone salesman turned telecom tycoon, Sunil Bharti Mittal, or could have asked the late Dhirubhai Ambani, first a petrol pump attendant, then a global business player, about the merits of the marketplace and the opportunities that abound.

Like in politics, however, there is another side to markets, the disempowering side. That is the sad reality for 250 million Indians. They cannot access the market without purchasing power. And they do not have incomes because they do not have capabilities. More importantly, they lack the education, nutrition and health required to grasp opportunities.

India will be truly empowered when these millions have the capabilities to climb the ladder of economic opportunity. The people of India need state and markets to work in tandem, in an optimum-mix, if they are to be empowered.

Recognising that we are latecomers in human history
TO understand empowerment, one has to understand what one was given at the time of one’s birth: one’s innate potential as well as one’s native limitations. We arrive in this world in a human shape with all the promises and hazards of our species. We are born with needs and capabilities, including the ability to learn and the awareness of being ourselves.

We share these with our ancestors and with our future generations. Collectively, our species has a history and our individual lives are only a minute and evanescent part of that history.

The word empowerment is used today in the sense of enabling a human individual to realise her/his life without any hindrances or fetters. We use it of Dalits and women, for instance. Political newspeak in India has spewed some grotesque euphemisms such as ‘‘weaker sections of society’’.

We are afraid of calling a spade a spade. So we mask certain realities by using politically correct language. We know the difference between ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ and what gender, race, religion, class, or caste both ‘‘we’’ and ‘‘they’’ belong to. When these differences surface and explode, we become aware of the inconclusive civil war we dismiss as just another communal riot or anti-national eruption.

We have always contested the meaning of ‘‘India’’, the ‘‘nation’’, our ‘‘civilisation’’, our ‘‘history’’ and so on without bothering to question ourselves who ‘‘we’’ really are. And there’s the rub.

WE avoid facing the basic fact that we were all born as human beings surrounded by other human beings who were born before us and had already determined the world into which we arrived. We are all latecomers in human history and we are part of that history to others who will enter this world after us.

Our predecessors have interpreted the world for us and they have passed it on to us as a tradition or a heritage as though it was a finished, completed, and perfect interpretation. This is obviously not true. Every newborn human is born with the capacity to experience, learn, understand, and re-interpret the given world.

My idea of a birthright stems from my innate cognitive, moral, and aesthetic self-awareness. This is what I have the right to exercise in terms of action, in living the way I know is right for me, and for all other human beings with whom I may identify myself.

I therefore have the birthright to define my own swaraj: it cannot be something that is limited by the manmade political boundaries of the ‘‘nation’’ in which I was born. It has to be understood in terms of the limitations of my species and the planet it is heir to.

Therefore, empowering ‘‘India’’ is simply to reinforce and reiterate the idea that Indians can and will change India as real human beings facing life in this part of a whole and indivisible planet, and its human heritage, in their temporal trust.

Information + Knowledge
MY own understanding of empowering India means empowering its people. People will make India empowered. People, all shades, irrespective of religious belief, ethnic origin, caste, creed, male and female need be empowered.

But what do mean by being empowered and how does one get empowered? Simply, people need to be provided with educational qualifications and opportunities to acquire such qualifications — qualification to do productive work enabling them to earn enough for a decent living.

It is despicable that we still have 36 per cent of our people illiterate, with a high school drop-out ratio, very low level of technical professionals or craftsmen, high child mortality rate, poor primary health.

Inward-looking policies, influence of the Soviet planning model, inability to capture the mood of the people, all contributed to this.

TODAY, economic reforms have paved the way for higher growth. This is good, but not enough. The male dominated political apparatus feels shy to give even one-third seats in Parliament to women. We need to think about the hundreds of ethnic minorities scattered all over India, particularly in the Northeast, who feel left out.

Having knowledge and information is empowerment. Spreading information throughout India, enabling people to make use of it, will make India truly empowered and prosperous.