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'Need to temper power with accountability'

When I said to a friend that I would love to write about things pertaining to the goings-on in India with a Non-Resident Indian view (I have been in the United States for a little less than ten years now), the suggestion was that the first column be about 1,000-1,200 words in length and should focus on US perceptions of India.

Unfortunately, unless I repeat every word about 50 times, I cannot come up to the required length. India and about 98 per cent of the countries do not register at all over here, except as footnotes in Page 6 columns, or when tragedies occur, or wars are imminent.

However, I decided to do as suggested and give my version of the perception of India here, and then talk about things that I think matter.

India - dusty, third world, Taj Mahal, dirty, low cost IT, horrible toilets, mathematical geniuses, poverty, oily hair, curry, software, violence, tandoori chicken, lawlessness, arranged marriage, religious fundamentalism, nuclear power, bullock carts.

It is sad to see centuries of culture and a bewildering diversity of people be reduced to 20-odd words when it comes to measuring India's perception in the US.

This is not to imply that there is no genuine understanding; it exists, but with a miniscule segment of intelligentsia, and some Indophiles.

The vast majority of Americans are usually blissfully unaware of other cultures/countries till some calamity spurs them otherwise. I am not suggesting this is entirely their fault; I shall try and explore some other time why the onus of educating and enchanting lies squarely upon us.

What I really wanted to explore is why India, with nearly as many people as China and a vastly superior infotech workforce, is still a third-rate economic power and does not register as even a blip when the G7 meets.

Since this is a complicated issue and requires us to explore a variety of issues, I will - some other time - attempt to lay these out in the order of importance and along the way make some stray observations about my impressions of current events as they unfold in our fascinating land.

I am not a qualified economist or journalist; these are just things as I see them, written as plainly as I can. It troubles me deeply to see things the same or worse since I left a while back.

What is especially troubling is to see our enormous potential be frittered away, much like the numerous 'snatching defeat from the jaws of victory' episodes enacted by our cricket team.

Before we explore the economic and political reasons for this state of being we need to examine the cultural ethos. I write this not as an NRI who is ashamed of his country or culture (there are many here like that), but as someone who cares very deeply about India, plans to retire and die there and someone very proud to be an Indian.

What has become apparent to me over the years is the shirking of responsibility at all levels in society. This is especially acute as the amount of power vested with the individual increases.

This is apparent as one spends a day in any Indian city in the air-conditioned plushness of a private sector office or the paan-stained corridors of any government office. I am not sure if this blatant disregard for the responsibilities that come with power is a recent phenomenon, or has always been part of our ethos.

What I do know is that there are richie-rich kids who do not think twice about driving drunk and mowing down innocent people, and those drunk on their fathers' power kill people trying to date their sisters, and chief ministers who seem to love some of their constituents more than others.

Let's examine a case in point: the Gujarat tragedy.

Now unless I have totally forgotten my civics from class VII, India is a sovereign, socialist, secular republic. And unless I totally missed a chapter, nowhere does it say that given certain provocation it is totally okay for mobs to take to the street, target a particular community and then carry out a large-scale murder, looting and arson exercise.

Given that I did not start drinking till much later I am also pretty sure that I did not miss reading that police officers who did not go along with these mobs were to be summarily transferred to remote locations, and Cabinet ministers would be allowed to sit in control rooms to direct police away from areas where mobs were on the rampage.

Now I don't profess to understand the underlying tension or centuries-old simmering hostilities that exist in every nook and cranny of India's dusty villages and towns, or the anger and frustration felt by the family and friends of the victims of the Godhra massacre.

But the simple fact which we have to decide is are we to be a nation governed by laws, or should we to lapse into some medieval impersonation of a democracy where might is right and where the vocal minority makes its own laws.

I do not really believe that in current times we can magically overcome all of our differences - religious, political, casteist, imaginary or otherwise. There is no Mahatma Gandhi out there who will magically rid us of our basest impulses and our feelings of being slighted, insulted, taken advantage off (again imagined or otherwise).

But if we are to become a part of the 21st century we do have to enforce certain basic principles. The chief among those has to be that there are certain written laws, and the foremost duty of every elected official is to live and die by those laws.

They have to shoulder the responsibility of doing everything in their power to ensure these laws are upheld. Right now our democracy is like Swiss cheese: with every riot and every flagrant violation of power a new hole is blasted into it and unless we do something, all we will be left with soon is a big-hole - no cheese, just a hole.

India is like that special relative (cousin, nephew, niece, son) who gives you fits of frustration and anger as you see so much promise and potential fall by the wayside, but whom you cannot help but love.

We are not very far from being a great country, but it appears very far because of some basic flaws that, however much we try to disguise, keep rearing their ugly head.

To be great, one of the essentials is to be economically strong, and to be economically strong one has to inspire confidence in our functioning and behavior as a society around the world.

To do that we have to ensure power is not the end all, be all and a vehicle for personal aggrandizement; power has to be encumbered with responsibility, and the bearer has to accept that. He/she has to accept that responsibility "not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially."

As a great man said a long time ago we made a tryst with destiny and we need to do our very best to redeem that pledge.

I have full confidence we will.

Anurag Pal is Director of Business Development at BizGenics, a software start-up in Silicon Valley.

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