Commentary / Mani Shankar Aiyar

Why have we Indians ceased to be proud of being Indians?

I also had the good fortune of serving on Parliament's standing committee on HRD, which examined in detail the Bill for establishing the Maulana Azad Urdu university. I had rather hoped the inauguration of that university could be a high point of the celebrations, but as the Bill is still waiting to be even introduced, I doubt that the university will be in place before 15 August, 1997, is upon us.

Like the suggestions outlined here, I am certain there must have been scores of other ideas, more imaginative and more practical, that must have flowed in. Despite the national mood, we could have organised a fitting tribute to 50 years of freedom. When we were in office, we didn't; I cannot see how the Deve Gowda government's late start can get us beyond tokenism.

Why have we Indians ceased to be proud of being Indians? Why have we ceased to be proud of India? Why does half-a-century of freedom mean so little to us?

Of course, we are a nation on the downswing -- no doubt about that. We have conquered famine but, beyond that, we have made little dent on poverty. There is an enormous middle class but his midle class of other countries, especially those of South-East and East Asia which came to freedom after us, and there is then despair at the paucity of our achievement rather than pride at our having taken this middle class exponentially to ten or more times the size we inherited at Independence.

But more, perhaps, than our failures on the development front, it is the turpitude of our public life that has induced this sense of haunting failure. We associate our politics not with the remarkable freedom it has given the Citizen but the corroding corruption of every institution of governance.

Where at Independence, and for many years thereafter, the moral high ground appeared to be the natural monopoly of the Mahatma's India, the moral tone rings shrilly false today. And where as a nation we had learned from Gandhiji to set our own standards, we have in the last few years quite lost our capacity to determine for ourselves where we want to go and how to get there. Almost by definition, we must necessarily fall behind the standards that other set for us.

We have lost the coordinates which determined the strategy of our nation-building. From the great moral, historical and political abstractions of Gandhi and Nehru, we have, in the name of pragmatism, departed from ideology. We are seeking consciously to become a nation of pragmatists. The immediate and the expedient, rather than the principled and the long term, is becoming the drum beat to which the new India marches. Pragmatism, as a way of life, soon leads to a loss of focus, a dimming of vision. It is this psychological and spiritual price we are paying for elevating material rewards to the status of touchstone of failure and success.

Such a nation can celebrate the opening of the 50th branch of McDonalds, not the 50th anniversary of Independence. That, I suspect, is why no one cares a damn that 50 years ago, India woke to life and liberty.