It’s heartening to note that, unlike here, educated high-profile Indian-origin people are making waves and wielding power at the highest levels of governance in the US and the UK. The grim fact is also that those with insignificant academic profiles or credentials are mostly the movers and shakers on the Indian political turf. Suella Braverman, named as UK home secretary by new prime minister Liz Truss, holds the third rank in the ministry, the second being the Chancellor of the exchequer. Meanwhile, Indian-origin Priti Patel has exited and so did chancellor Rishi Sunak after he lost the fight to become the PM. Suella is a lawyer by profession, just as US vice president Kamala Harris whose mother was Indian. These worthies climbed up the ladder and held the top posts even as the population of Indians in the UK as per a recent count was no more than 2.5 per cent and in the US 1.5 per cent.
Clearly, democracy’s tone, tenor and content in the West are different from that of India, the Asian nation that claims to be the world’s largest democracy. It’s safe to stress that quality counts in the Western scheme of things; set against the deeply-entrenched ‘chacha bathija’ culture here, where nepotism and favouritism are the ways of life in almost every field. Dynasties have made the scenario worse. The result is, merit is the first casualty. Brain power among the ‘movers and shakers’ is perceptibly in short supply while many among them revel in ‘throwing their weight around’. The deep social divides like caste and religion take the upper hand in electoral arithmetic, their sum total leaving a bitter taste behind. Little wonder, then, that Indian democracy lacks the shine of governance systems in the West in terms of merit and brain power. In the long run, where this will lead the nation to is anybody’s guess.
As for matters of application of merit in selection of key functionaries of government, the top executive holds the key. This has a trickle-down trend, positive or negative, and it percolates down to the lowest levels. Run-of-the-mill politicians who made politics the end all and be all of their lives with no application of their mind on serious and complex aspects of life are a curse on the nation. Over the years, like bureaucrats, they have formed themselves into a bundle of vested interests. When politicians and bureaucrats compete among themselves to make gains for themselves at the cost of national interests, they defeat the people.
