A proud India celebrates its 77th Republic Day with pomp, colour and a symbolic yet impressive display of its military prowess, in the national capital today. The long period – over three quarters of a century – under Self Rule after the British exit from this landmass in 1947 – was certainly one of progress on many fronts. India hopes to be the third largest global economy in a few years – reaching a shade closer to both the United States and China. With a GDP of four-trillion plus, India surpassed Japan to become the fourth and aims to outwit Germany in around four years. The gloom of the Socialist era is a thing of the past. The post-liberalization era saw the emergence of a large middle class forming some 30 per cent of the population by now. They drive the economy forward. It must also be stressed that the collective energy of our 1.4billion population is what makes India’s growth epoch-making. Being the world’s largest population by now, India also boasts of having the largest share of young people –some 65 per cent of the total. India, is in a sense unstoppable because of them.
While also granting the successive governments their share of credit for this progress, what must be stressed is that India could have worked wonders with this large mass of productive energy, had the youths been endowed with the skills and resources to drive this growth in super-speed. Large numbers of educated youths are idling away their time, more so in the rural areas, where there hardly are opportunities for employment. Making them start their own units is difficult due to their lack of financial resources and the freewheeling corruption and red tape in the bureaucracy. The result is inertia. Foreign firms are largely unwilling to step in here due to the massive corruption in the system. FDI is not coming in, in an expected way, and the manufacturing sector is failing to gain strength even as India now has the lowest wages. Wages in China are better. Yet, multinational companies from there are reluctant to transplant their units to India because of the loose systems, bureaucratic controls and political corruption here. When Liberalization dawned on us in the 1990s, the promise was that red tape and the licence raj would be eliminated. Today, under Modi, there are more controls through a surfeit of new rules and regulations – which are only helping the corrupt to take bribes for every signature appended.
When we celebrate 77 years of our Republic and the launch of the Constitution, it is worth taking a close look as to how the citizens are benefited by the laws and principles that guide the nation. Several crores of cases are pending in courts and their number is progressively increasing. Cases go on and on for decades, discouraging ordinary people from approaching the courts to seek justice. Justice delayed is justice denied. The footloose ‘desi’ rule has resulted into poor governance lacking accountability in almost all several spheres of the public delivery system. India’s democracy is increasingly turning into an oligarchy. The poor remain where they were while the handful of rich control the country’s wealth. The Constitution is applied now in the breach. Hence the celebration of Republic Day remains performative only.
