Analyzes causes for the anger of India's new generation in the context of the recent heinous rape of Amanat in New Delhi

1. Solidity or Pure Wind: India’s Political Class and GenNext at the Crossroads - I
Barun Kumar Basu
George Orwell believed there was a close association between bad prose and
oppressive ideology, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible.” Thus “political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder
respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” India’s current political
class is a classic example of Orwellian doublespeak, right from “cattle class” to “theek hai”
played in the spirit of a weekend East Bengal vs. Mohun Bagan football match with the
political class on one side and hapless citizens covering their own goal on the other against
the State as marauder.
Exposed to external influences, post-1991 GenNext is the product and beneficiary of
liberalization. They have access to job opportunities my son’s generation never had. For
them, the Internet is just a mouse click away with staggering mountains of information.
Social networking sites across the world have enabled Indian youngsters to imbibe the
values of democratic nations, for better and worse. GenNext is also witness to the
dismantling of totalitarian empires and the expression of human freedom worldwide. The
state having shrunk in terms of the patronage it once had, GenNext also, no longer, is as
dependent on the State for job opportunities. A rapidly expanding and aggressive private
sector has expanded the vistas of the State in trade and commerce and even gone overseas
into a New World of their own, basing them on GenNext that retains active contact with
their ilk back home.
State-sponsored enterprise has been miserably exposed to GenNext by
benchmarking with the private sector and global standards of efficiency. GenNext also reads
sordid tales of underhand benefits accruing to politicians and bureaucrats from subterfuges
like Private-Public-Partnerships and so-called joint ventures. Yet GenNext has risen and
shone mainly of their own steam, is fiercely zealous of their rights (though not always their
obligations), not dependent upon state largesse and lives in an India they rightly believe has
the potential to be a superpower, but for the frigidity of its political class, cutting across
party lines. There is politics in education, health services, and provision of water and railway
lines, scholarships, jobs, and trade licenses for the unemployed, indeed every walk of life.
There is little reason for fulfillment and expectations of equity and fair play anywhere for
GenNext.
Vigilante groups affiliated to political parties that storm bars and nightclubs and bully
teenagers in the name of religious conservatism, rape of women who are GenNext’s
mothers, sisters and wives, legislatures that suddenly guillotine matters of the greatest
socio-economic importance such as anti-corruption laws, an antiquated, overloaded and
understaffed legal system that offers little or no redress, the non-existence/failure of
administrative grievance redressing mechanisms in governance and the repeated attempts
to undermine institutions such as the Information Commissions – all this and much more is
but a full bottle of bitter pills for GenNext, as it is for their seniors. However, such pills,
unlike Valium, do not kill, but energize anger in GenNext in dangerous ways.
GenNext faces steadily rotting State-operated university systems that denies
admission to students with 95% and above in Class 12 in school but these very students top
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2. the merit list for entry into the London School of Economics and Harvard University. Those
with lower marks must make do with ramshackle underfunded colleges and indifferent
teachers who lack even elementary teaching skills and commitment, least of all any
accountability. The school education system spawns generations of students who are unable
to comprehend the goings-on in the world around them; hence the likes of Baba Ramdev
emerge as leaders. For lowest academic performers from university, there are no
worthwhile vocational training colleges that would empower them to lead their lives
respectably, instead turn them to a life of crime or unwillingly work as semi-indentured
labor or menials in a service agency even as rebellion rises to a crescendo in them. Even for
outstanding students, academic curriculum is but a deflated bladder that has too many
holes to repair and make it rise once again. Lessons on morality and ethics, basic laws, etc.
that would influence and educate GenNext against any waywardness do not even figure in
school and university curricula. Yet we expect saints of our young, when our system creates
monsters. Therefore when such a rebellious GenNext member is caught over speeding on
Rajpath and promptly fined Rs. 500, but finds the constable ready to let him go in return for
Rs. 250 getaway bribe, the youngster is happy even as the corrupt system ensnares him and
he learns to live life king-size, bribing his way through life. There is none to guide him back
into a relatively more virtuous mainstream.
It is but natural for GenNext to be peeved when prominent members of the political
class speak of traveling “cattle class” while others utter “theek hai” in moments of grave
crisis, as if the nation with 40% of its total voters being people below the age of forty years
are no more than obedient cows that must bow to the arrogance of the leaders they
elected. Twitterati and FBians, litter our political spaces even as citizens are increasingly
reduced to mere statistics on Excel work sheets. That India now possesses a power-packed
GenNext after India’s world opened up in 1991 did not matter to the political class that,
nonetheless, retained its hard-handed arbitrariness eternally grouted in the colonial past.
Disconnect between the rulers and the ruled could never have been greater.
It stands entirely to the credit of our GenNext that they took to the streets
protesting against rape, corruption and host of other burning issues and the media that ably
supported them with extensive coverage. Yet they sadly lacked any leadership. No media
studio-hopping political gasbag or social butterfly mouthing pious platitudes every evening,
save for sundry members of this class who ‘smelt’ another opportunity to play Good
Samaritan for their narrow political ends, was visible at any such gathering for the security
of home was the safest bet then.
The author is a former Ambassador of India
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3. Solidity or Pure Wind: India’s Political Class and GenNext at the Crossroads - II
Barun Kumar Basu
Supporters of women’s legislation in legislatures, university student unions,
teachers’ and lawyers’ associations, were neither calming agitated crowds nor leading them,
for most of them owed allegiance to some section of the same political class that birthed
them. To their credit, concerned parents sympathized with kids in the severe Delhi winter
and, perhaps, ensured that the situation did not get out of hand. In her passing, Amanat
provided a core issue that mostly affected GenNext, as ex-US President Eisenhower aptly
said, to “…….protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is
good and fruitful in our national heritage.” Rape is certainly not our heritage nor can
corruption be allowed to become our national cottage industry.
It seemed the entire political class, cutting across political lines, with few exceptions,
was united in the preservation of the status quo for the benefits the system offered, either
in power or in anticipation of grabbing authority in the near future, even as Amanat died a
thousand deaths in her hospital bed. As the silent candle-carrying mourning crowds moved
along streets and India Gate, the police was there “for you, with you, always”, ready with
their water cannons and tear gas shells, truncheons and more. India Gate became India
Fortress while Metro stations were shut down perhaps in anticipation of a bombing raid by
unarmed and educated kids. The nation’s top political leaders met half a dozen students and
parents in the wee hours of the morning; even then it was a “hum dekhengey” approach
without promise of any concrete action. The insensitivity of the State was manifest in a
senior central bureaucrat complimenting his police honcho on his adept “handling of the
situation.” And when finally the bigwigs decided to make their media presence felt, it was
just a “theek hai”, by Orwell’s definition giving “….an appearance of solidity to pure wind”!
When it became apparent that the youngsters would not yield, the political class
even chartered an air ambulance to jettison Amanat in a Singapore hospital and then
brought her body back in a special Air India flight at the dead of night, that too most
surreptitiously! Even when it came to compensating a dead citizen’s needy family, the State
accorded generous largesse to its fallen police employee while Amanat’s bereaved namak-
roti family will vanish into oblivion soon. It was a travesty that the political class waged war
upon its electors, governors pitched against their own citizens, using illegitimate force to
suppress legitimate demand to protect their lives, liberty and properties.
If India’s GenNext moved forward in the last two decades after 1991, clearly India’s
political class and their means of retaining authority remained firmly grouted in colonial
India. It was sadly reminiscent of the beginning of the Church and a decadent nobility of the
pre- and Tudor and Stuart eras in England fighting a losing battle with the resurgent middle
class over the next 400 years for a promising new order in society, polity and the economy,
something India, at this take-off stage, can ill afford. America’s Declaration of Independence
(1776) stated that “…. that all men are created equal, …… with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness………..That whenever any
Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter
or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles
and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their
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4. Safety and Happiness.” Amanat may have passed into eternity but her legacy has raised
several disturbing questions, notably in the right of citizens to change governments
“deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This has, in turn, called into
question the capability and willingness of both the polity and its political class “to effect the
safety and happiness” of GenNext, indeed of the whole nation.
History shows that educated mass but leaderless GenNext protests over burning
issues could see coalescing of many fringe, and often violent, groups for political advantage
that may plunge the nation into a state of civil war. Equally, such continuing protest may
also witness the further fragmentation of the Indian polity, though not entirely unwelcome,
by the coalescing of hitherto apolitical but educated groups around cores of GenNext in
support of Charles de Gaulle’s “…….conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left
to the politicians.” In the worst case scenario, Elections 2014 may equally revolve around
GenNext as India’s feudal political class desperately tries to ‘buy’ and corrupt GenNext with
free-flowing but ill-gotten moneys. If that happens, it would merge both Mohun Bagan and
East Bengal’s goal posts into one as the politician referee blows his final whistle hustling this
noble land back to a dark and medieval age. In 1866, British Prime Minister WE Gladstone
famously asserted that “Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence.
Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.” GenNext is straining to jettison
conservatism and adopt liberalism. The warning signals are loud and clear for India’s
political class to accept the fact that “political speech and writing are largely the defense of
the indefensible” and that GenNext also derives its legitimacy from the parenthood of the
entire nation and its electors. Therefore, the need to urgently address the multifarious
concerns of GenNext can, no longer, remain understated for India’s political class, cutting
across political party lines, if the integrity of the nation and its development are to remain
assured. Banking on short public memory dangerously conceals uncontrolled explosion to
blowing point. What if 2% of residual memory for 50 failures each made for a 100% vote
against the polity and the political class in Elections 2014? Where will India go from there? I
leave my readers to find appropriate answers.
The author is a former Ambassador of India
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