The Indian state?s degradation and dilution

7/11. (Why always the number 11?). Mumbai is shattered by serial blasts. A couple of hours later, the home minister reads a weak and simplistic statement, looking down at a slip of paper, without raising his eyes to face the nation. No policemen in sight as citizens help the injured and move the dying to hospitals. We hear that the Prime Minister is in a ?closed door meeting? with his advisors. He takes 25 hours to address the nation, a period of time when his countrymen, women and children, facing the growing realities of a soft state, needed his reassurance. Juxtaposed to this soft state was the overflowing strength and fortitude of ordinary people who took charge, so to speak, and did not wait for the government machinery to act. This, once again, brought home the truth of how the Indian state has degraded, corrupted and diluted itself, how it has betrayed the intrinsic greatness of this land and her diverse people.

For decades, Indian entrepreneurship was strangled by the command economy that was essential for the first decade post-1947, but that needed to have been restructured in the early 60s. We were 30 years too late, all for populist reasons. When we began the process of undoing the shackles of a constricted economy waiting to fly, we did not ensure the fundamentals and the infrastructure to take the poor and less privileged in our society into the artery of growth and development. Now, in the first decade of the new millennium, we are beginning to regress once again because we are unable to put in new methodologies and systems that should guide and govern a modern, vibrant and energetic nation. A selfish, greedy, exploitative political class has failed us. A class without any intellectual prowess.

In the name of ?coalition politics?, ruling parties have abdicated their mandate and succumbed to blackmail and veiled and, often, open threats from their partners who seem to be there only to garner gains for themselves at the cost of the larger nation-state. Citizens of India, rich and poor, acknowledge this total lack of appropriate governance as a charade played out by the rulers and their administration to remain in power. Political betrayal, across all dispensations, is there to witness and experience. It is a dangerous time, one where there is no accountability and no radical alternatives. In their ?insecurity? as rulers within a soft and vulnerable state apparatus, governments tend to impose regulations and make interventions that can be described sometimes as ?draconian?, often as regressive, and occasionally as techniques of harassment, as new avenues for the ?keepers of the rule and law? to demand money, openly.

With three great economists at the helm of India today, surely they can begin with working out a structure and system in which regular, honest taxpayers, those who have been paying their taxes from the time they became eligible to do so, are treated with dignity.

One: list and computerise all individual taxpayers. Order that none of them are harassed or questioned for spending their legitimate, earned and declared wealth. Chase all those whose names do not figure as taxpayers.

Two: list all the politicians, members of Parliament and state legislators, all government servants from all departments across the board and all public sector employees who have defaulted. Expose, punish and collect the arrears from them, with interest, first. Then publish the list in the daily papers, in all regional languages as well. Reveal the real and thriving evaders and their corruption. Set them straight and with it an example of honourable citizenship. Punish tax department officials who demand a bribe before handing over income-tax refund cheques to clean and upright taxpayers. Get your own and your colleagues house in order first. Three: go to traders in jewellery, as one example, and unravel the corruption there, where the seller demands half the value in cash and takes a crossed cheque from the buyer.

Do not question, probe and harass legitimate taxpayers and probe what they have bought where, why and when with their white money. Do not waste time, money and energy on more paperwork around the honest in an attempt to find the dishonest. It is far too convoluted and compels corruption. People begin to wonder why they are being upright and declaring their income. Thanks to failed government mechanisms in India, honesty and integrity is seen to be a fetish, a waste of time.