Will India run aground or muddle through?

A small sentence in India Today (May 22, 2006) says it all. The Prime Minister and the finance minister had just finished addressing the delegates at the Asian Development Bank conference in Hyderabad, painting India with a positive brush and a rosy picture of the future. Within a few hours of his speech, we had news about the chairperson of the National Advisory Council (NAC) musing whether the advisability and validity of India?s various free trade agreements with Asian nations will be good for the country.

Human resource development minister Arjun Singh unleashes the worst social divide since VP Singh?s Mandal Commission in the 1990s. The NAC chairperson remains conspicuously sil-ent on the issue.

The statistics of reservations simply do not make any sense even to a standard XII student. Shortages of skilled personnel are projected in all spheres that are leading the country?s growth today. Yet, the solution that this government could come up with is quotas in unaided educational institutions, more reserved seats for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and a threatened legislation for quotas in the private sector.

Education is crying out to be freed from the clutches of the government. Talented and committed individuals do not become teachers for they draw a salary that is a small fraction of what their students get. Curriculum is the hand-maiden of ideologues. Arjun Singh?s predecessor could only think of lowering the fees in institutions of higher learning just before the elections.

Further, as the main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party did precious little to shape and lead a debate on this issue and hence, forfeited an opportunity to create a constructive outcome for India?s future in this most important area: the education of her present and future children. Parliament voted unanimously to amend the Constitution to clear the path for the electoral agenda of the Congress party.

On foreign policy, India is being led on a leash by the United States to barter away its national security for questionable technology. Media has been bought out, compromised or silenced. The chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, too, has remained silent after an initial remark or two. The same country is pushing India to compromise on the Siachen glacier and cede territory to her neighbour that has shown scant regard for India?s sensitivities.

The Left is principled when it comes to opposing the design of India?s neo-colonial master. At the same time, they do not wish India to be led by Indians for India. It is just that they would prefer the masters to be either the Chinese or the Pakistanis or an alliance of the two. Sensing this, some opinion makers and intellectuals have perhaps, concluded, that it is better and patriotic to be co-opted by the US for her ends than by the communists for their ends. They had, in their minds, chosen the lesser of the two evils for their motherland.

A decorated police officer says in an interview that there are roughly two crore illegal Bangladeshis in the country and that Bangladesh poses the gravest security threat to this country. The party that won freedom for the nation from foreign occupation chose to nullify the judgment of the Supreme Court and allow illegal foreigners to stay so that their votes could help it win a state election while their bombs could take out more Indian lives.

Here again, the contribution of the main Opposition party, the BJP, has been close to zero. It did precious little to stop the illegal influx of immigrants when it was in power for nearly six years. It was passive when Indian soldiers were killed and their bodies mutilated by the Bangladeshi army. So, readers can compete to choose the worst culprit of the two main national parties.

Ms J Jayalalithaa did not lose her election in Tamil Nadu on May 8, 2006, but on the day she chose to turn her victory over government servants of the state into a war of vendetta.

Instead of being magnanimous in victory, she chose to rub their noses to the ground, when they were ready to apologise for their lawless behaviour. She ignored the apology. Far from being their leader, she chose to be their villain. A precious opportunity to set a wonderful example of tough and sensitive governance for other states to follow was spurned. In the end, Tamil Nadu ended up rolling back many of its progressive initiatives. Worse, she turned to populism and was beaten in that game by a past master. The state has been returned to fiscal insanity. Its brief flirtation with a bold vision was just that.

A political party (Lok Parithran) that was founded by the educated and the intelligent with a view to ushering in a different vision and that even bravely contested the elections in Tamil Nadu has already split, unable to reconcile its own internal differences. What a tragedy!

At this stage, it is possible to paint two future scenarios for the country: one is that it would be run aground and be dismembered by various foreign entities that are keen to prevent the emergence of a strong and unified India, aided in this task actively by her politicians and passively by the silence and inaction of all of us.

There is a second scenario which is somewhat more optimistic. It is that the selfish and narrow agendas of the multiple interest groups in the country would often collide with and cancel each other out, allowing the country to continue to muddle through and remain as a chaotic but single entity, as ever.

For eternal optimists, if either scenario is disappointing, there is an easy solution. Get the expectations down. To paraphrase Buddha (the original one), desire (and hope) is the root cause of all disappointments.

?The writer is the founder-director of Libran Asset Management (Pte) Ltd, Singapore. These are his personal views