The problem

CRYSTAL gazing at the best of times remains a hazardous exercise, probably more so for nations than individuals, professions or sectors. Recollect how often our psephologists get their election forecasts wrong, this despite increasingly sophisticated methodologies and more robust data sets. So, is talking about where we will be five years down the line no different from astrology, a compilation of wish lists designed to please the reader or, as is more likely, inform us about the predilections of the writer. One would like to believe that the exercise is not so open-ended, though almost invariably what we see, or prefer to see, is strongly reflective of our social positions.

The last time we indulged in collective crystal gazing was the run up to the new millennium. The mood then was cautiously optimistic. Possibly, the success in having broken through the barrier of the ‘Hindu rate of growth’, a comfortable forex position, the spectacular performance of the IT sector, the ostensible success of NRI professionals in the US, the ‘collective high’ from having announced ourselves as a nuclear weapons power, and the list can be expanded, had nudged significant sections of our elite to buy into the ‘Shining India’ campaign. The new century, many believed, belonged to Asia, and India, alongside China, was finally poised to assume its rightful place in global affairs.

Of course, there were the sceptics who forced our attention onto the negatives – the proportion of citizens below the poverty line, persisting inequalities, the problems of survival and exclusion, the growing Bharat-India divide, and so on. More troubling was the stodginess of our institutional structures – the rules and regulations governing us – and our mindsets which made it difficult to comprehend the many dramatic changes marking Indian state and society. A young people in an old country, simultaneously occupying multiple, conflicting, possibly incommensurate worlds.

We remained deeply sceptical, if not worried, about the state of our politics and polity – the fragmentation of national parties, the steadily growing influence of local and regional forces more wedded to raising concerns around social identity than advancing social issues, the lack of inner-party democracy and consultation engendering a greater distrust of political parties if not politics itself and, above all, an increasing recourse to violence in dispute settlement – all of which tended to de-legitimise state structures. Long used to looking up to the state and a maibaap sarkar governed by a cohesive party, the difficulty in coming to terms with the growing salience of the market and new wealth creators often succeeding despite rather than because of the state, created dissonance. And yet, despite persistence of issues and concerns that we had inherited at independence, it was possible to sense the growing confidence and pride that a new generation of Indians displayed.

Is this changing? Are we, as a people and nation, failing to capitalize on the developments of the last decade and a half? Have our ways of thinking and acting, in particular our ability to reform institutions and create new ones more in sync with the changing demands of the times, declined? Can we, as our leaders keep reminding us, ‘think out of the box’?

To many, uneasy with the alarming rise in atavistic passions and confessional politics – a marker of the years from Mandal and Mandir to Gujarat – the previous general elections may have come as a welcome reprieve. The hope was that we were back on track, prepared to attend to more needed and urgent tasks than building temples or settling old scores with communities marked out as alien. The elevation of Manmohan Singh, widely respected as a ‘decent’ person and the announcement of a ‘common minimum programme’ designed to address the concerns of a ‘forgotten India’, met with a welcome response. But, in the short time since, the mood seems to have turned decidedly sombre.

Is it that we expect too much in too short a time, unmindful of the need to carve consensus and carry along millions of co-citizens, most without the wherewithal to elbow their way into ‘mainstream consciousness’, and that too in a complex national and global environment? The choice of a five year span is not purely coincidental. It forces us to think beyond the master frames of plan periods or parliamentary terms and regime cycles. Projecting 2020 rather than 2010, though preferable for capturing trends, could on the other hand be too long for a set of state and political elites more obsessed with thinking about tomorrow than of a future where they may not be relevant players.

There are those who argue that five years is too short a time to expect any realistic change, more so in a land long portrayed as a lumbering elephant. But changes, when they do happen, are often dramatic and swift. Just think 1989 and how rapidly cold war mindsets were made irrelevant. Or 9/11 and how soon the spectre of terrorism became hegemonic. Closer home, who would have anticipated even a few years back how much the growth of mobile telephony would reorder our lives, redefine relationships and recast opportunities. The issue is, are we ready, and confident of being able to leverage the new opportunities thrown up by emerging technologies and integrating markets?

The pressure to change, to dream opportunity rather than work to preserve turf is inexorable, most of all from the young. Not only have they experienced more change than previous generations but appear impatient with advice of caution. And while this tendency may be more pronounced in metro India – the better endowed regions and people, to assume that village or small town India remains trapped in a time warp would be an error.

This is not to downplay other signals. The latest NSSO data on per capita consumption of different social groups presents an alarming picture of the invisibilised. The recent Maoist strike in Jehanabad too reminds that over a quarter of the country has to contend with serious militancy. And this is not all. We may crow about our ability to successfully execute a metro rail project in the capital, but still have to learn how to fix drains and prevent the flooding of our major cities..

If this remains the norm, we are in for more troubled times. But, if we can force change in the way we think and act, recast our moribund institutional structure of politics and decision-making, above all engage and not encourage the secession of the successful, we can have a future. And five years should be sufficient time to test this proposition.