The ruling class has failed the nation by not governing the country honestly , sincerely and devotedly. We need to learn from our past mistakes and move on.
V.S.Pandey
The current corona surge has started showing a downward trend but infection numbers are still more than twice the peak numbers noted during the first cycle. The kind of panic people witnessed during the past month or so was unprecedented and caused tremendous misery. Many developed nations of Europe and USA also faced unprecedented hardships and a huge number of deaths last year, due to this pandemic. They learned their lessons and did their best to ramp up all that was needed to strengthen their health care machinery so as to enable them to handle the future waves effectively and save as many lives as possible. We will also overcome the current corona surge soon but need to carry out radical improvements in all those areas wherever shortcomings were noticed in handling the current crisis.
Ours is a developing country with a 140 crore plus population and widespread poverty. Even after more than seven decades of self-rule, we are still labelled a poor country with millions of people living below the poverty line and suffering all kinds of deprivations. The moot question is not whether we handled the current surge effectively and efficiently but why we have failed to provide basic services, proper infrastructure, health care, education and justice system to our population. We need answers to these questions from those in power now and also from those who ruled our country, bureaucracy included, for the past several decades. Undoubtedly, the ruling class has failed the nation by not governing the country honestly , sincerely and devotedly. We need to learn from our past mistakes and move on.
First things first. Honestly and integrity have to be given top priority in decision making. We, the people while exercising our franchise, have to choose only those who have integrity and are capable and stop voting for those with illicit money and muscle power or on the basis of caste and religion. People have to become aware that having voted on caste and religious line has not helped us to solve even a single problem plaguing the nation neither choosing people with money bags and bahubalis has helped them get justice . Collectively, we are all culprits in creating and then perpetuating this corruption ridden political and administrative system which doesn’t do anything unless bribed. It all starts at the top. If we choose people on wrong parameters, mal -governance will be the norm. Cleansing the political system is the urgent and acute need. For that to happen ,a new set of people with long term apprenticeship in integrity have to come forward and enter the political arena. The unfortunate part is that most of the right thinking people “hate politics”. George Orwell , author of Animal Farm ,had said “ In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, follies , hatred and schizophrenia.” As famous French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had famously opined” we are our choices .“ So what we are getting today by way of governance , is our choice. For decades, the largest number of votes have been cast for currency notes, a pouch of liquor, gifts, and other such allurements. The logic is clear, vote for those that bribe you , then corrupt government is inevitable and then suffer its egregious consequences. It was the natural outcome of the way we decided to cast our votes. We chose to mostly vote for the dishonest and deceitful, so we are reaping the fruits of our own choices.
There are some motivated voices now which are trying to set the narrative that “we have too much of democracy.” They are endeavoring fat millionaires to divert the attention of the people from the failure of governments and suggesting that the democratic form of governance is itself responsible for the mess that we are in , hinting towards our errant neighbour who succeeded in expanding its economic might despite the lack of democracy. These people are deliberately trying to coverup the shortcomings of the government by negating the stark reality that all the developed countries are liberal democracies only. The history of our civilisation testifies that the people are happiest in a democratic setup and they have been able to solve all their basic issues while being part of democratic institutions.
The time has come for the people of India to make a course correction and stop choosing the unprincipled, dishonest, and those banking on black money, muscle power, casteism and promoting a communal agenda and start voting for qualities like integrity, honesty, capability and impartiality in those standing in elections. This is the solution to resolve all our problems. Otherwise the price of our apathy towards public affairs, is to be ruled by evil men.
(Vijay Shankar Pandey is former Secretary to Government of India)
