India

Henry David Thoreau, American Thinker & Author: Whenever I have read any part of the Vedas, I have felt that some unearthly and unknown light illuminated me. In the great teaching of the Vedas, there is no touch of sectarianism. It is of all ages, climbs, and nationalities and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge. When I read it, I feel that I am under the spangled heavens of a summer night.

India

Romain Rolland, French scholar : "If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India."

Vande Mataram

Lyrics of Vande Mataram
वन्दे मातरम्
सुजलां सुफलां मलयजशीतलाम्
शस्यशामलां मातरम् ।
शुभ्रज्योत्स्नापुलकितयामिनीं
फुल्लकुसुमितद्रुमदलशोभिनीं
सुहासिनीं सुमधुर भाषिणीं
सुखदां वरदां मातरम् ।। १ ।। वन्दे मातरम् ।
कोटि-कोटि-कण्ठ-कल-कल-निनाद-कराले
कोटि-कोटि-भुजैर्धृत-खरकरवाले,
अबला केन मा एत बले ।
बहुबलधारिणीं नमामि तारिणीं
रिपुदलवारिणीं मातरम् ।। २ ।। वन्दे मातरम् ।
तुमि विद्या, तुमि धर्म
तुमि हृदि, तुमि मर्म
त्वं हि प्राणा: शरीरे
बाहुते तुमि मा शक्ति,
हृदये तुमि मा भक्ति,
तोमारई प्रतिमा गडि
मन्दिरे-मन्दिरे मातरम् ।। ३ ।। वन्दे मातरम् ।
त्वं हि दुर्गा दशप्रहरणधारिणी
कमला कमलदलविहारिणी
वाणी विद्यादायिनी, नमामि त्वाम्
नमामि कमलां अमलां अतुलां
सुजलां सुफलां मातरम् ।। ४ ।। वन्दे मातरम् ।
श्यामलां सरलां सुस्मितां भूषितां
धरणीं भरणीं मातरम् ।। ५ ।। वन्दे मातरम् ।।
Translation by Sri Aurobindo
Mother, I bow to thee!
Rich with thy hurrying streams,
bright with orchard gleams,
Cool with thy winds of delight,
Dark fields waving Mother of might,
Mother free.

Glory of moonlight dreams,
Over thy branches and lordly streams,
Clad in thy blossoming trees,
Mother, giver of ease
Laughing low and sweet!
Mother I kiss thy feet,
Speaker sweet and low!
Mother, to thee I bow.

Who hath said thou art weak in thy lands
When the sword flesh out in the seventy million hands
And seventy million voices roar
Thy dreadful name from shore to shore?
With many strengths who art mighty and stored,
To thee I call Mother and Lord!
Though who savest, arise and save!
To her I cry who ever her foeman drove
Back from plain and Sea
And shook herself free.

Thou art wisdom, thou art law,
Thou art heart, our soul, our breath
Though art love divine, the awe
In our hearts that conquers death.
Thine the strength that nervs the arm,
Thine the beauty, thine the charm.
Every image made divine
In our temples is but thine.

Thou art Durga, Lady and Queen,
With her hands that strike and her
swords of sheen,
Thou art Lakshmi lotus-throned,
And the Muse a hundred-toned,
Pure and perfect without peer,
Mother lend thine ear,
Rich with thy hurrying streams,
Bright with thy orchard gleems,
Dark of hue O candid-fair

In thy soul, with jewelled hair
And thy glorious smile divine,
Lovilest of all earthly lands,
Showering wealth from well-stored hands!
Mother, mother mine!
Mother sweet, I bow to thee,
Mother great and free!

India is Prospering, Indians are Not: Mani Shankar Aiyar: Hindustan Times 14 August 2010

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Another-India-wounded-bleeding/Article1-586849.aspx

India is prospering, Indians are not : Hindustan Times: 14 August 2010
Mani Shankar Aiyar
MP and former Union minister

As our 64th Independence Day arrives, so does the doleful news from the Oxford Poverty Institute and the United Nations Development Fund that the same India with the second highest growth rate in the world is also just about the worst performer on their newly devised Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index. Mesmerised as we are over our imminent Great Power status, the revelation that India in 2007 had the same position on the UN Human Development Index as it did in 1994, and the extraordinary reaction of the Government that at least we have risen from position 138 in 1997, has fallen virtually on deaf ears.

Sixty-five per cent of our population depends for their livelihood on a sector — agriculture and allied activities — that accounts for a mere 18 per cent of our GDP, a share that has been alarmingly declining over the past two decades. In the same year, 2009-10, that saw our GDP grow at over 7 per cent, agricultural output registered a rise of just 0.21 per cent.

Parliament is informed with insouciance that the Union budget for agriculture amounts to a mere 0.37 per cent of GDP. Whatever happened to Jawaharlal Nehru’s dictum, “Everything can wait, but not agriculture”? That seems to have changed to, “Nothing can wait, but agriculture” as we hurtle towards a situation in which the services sector — principally IT and IT-related services — which employs less than 1 per cent of our population, accounts for 57 per cent of our national income.
Manufacture leaps ahead in double-digit figures — but the share of our workforce in the organised sector stagnates at 8 per cent, the same as it was 20 years ago, because almost all growth in manufacturing is driven by capital-intensive technology at the expense of the labour-intensive small and medium enterprises.

National savings, rising so impressively that they now account for nearly a third of national income, are deliberately channeled to the stock market, where that tiny sliver of the population that plays the stock market makes unbelievable fortunes while agriculture and irrigation are starved of public investment on the specious argument that rural savings will find their way into private capital formation in the rural sector. They have not. In consequence, our average growth rate in agricultural output has staggered along at 1 per cent to 2 per cent while GDP has zoomed to just short of the 10 per cent mark.

Inevitably, 77 per cent of Indians in shining India live on under Rs 20 a day. To understand what that means, please note that under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme, the minimum prescribed wage is Rs 100 per day, but as only person per family is allowed to seek work on any given day, if that person belongs to a family of five (a gross underestimate for rural India) then the per capita income for that household comes to Rs 20 on the day one member of that family secures NREGA work.

In other words, 77 per cent of Indians live every day on less than what they would earn if they picked mud under NREGA the whole year round.

Income and wealth inequalities are growing so alarmingly in our society that instead of being obsessed with the wholly misleading impression of progress indicated by statistics of GDP growth (and per capita income derived from that figure), we need to recognise the more profound truth cached behind Oxford’s Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index and the UN Human Development Index — that 9 out of ten pregnant women in our country are anaemic; that in consequence nearly half our children under five are estimated to be from moderately to severely malnourished; that we have amongst the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world; that every year we add more hungry people to our population than the rest of the world put together; that foodgrain availability per capita is today, after 20 years of accelerated growth, less than it was 20 years ago; that the worst of this is that the output of coarse cereals — bajra, jowar, ragi, etc, which are the staple of the desperately poor — has actually declined while the economy booms; that the gap between demand and supply for pulses — the standard dal-roti of folklore — has widened; that in stark contrast to the Green Revolution in oilseeds in the 1980s, which saw output double in a mere 10 years, there has been negligible progress in un-irrigated rain-fed areas, which make up the bulk of the land from which the Indian kisan and khet mazdoor eke out a bare living.

Please tell me what should we be celebrating — that we have the fourth largest number of dollar billionaires in the world or Fortune India’s report that the wealth of the 100 richest Indians equals a quarter of our Gross Domestic Product?
Prof Pranab Bardhan of Stanford argued exactly a year ago in one of our pink papers that since we are the only country that measures poverty on the basis of consumption rather than income, we have so underestimated growing inequality in our economy that in actual fact, India’s Gini coefficient for rural incomes shows the skewing of income and wealth in India to be worse even than China’s.

Is it then surprising that we now face a huge contradiction between accelerated growth and inclusive growth? GDP measures the acceleration for a few; the Gini coefficient measures the exclusion of more than three-quarters of our people from that acceleration. That is the ugly reality at the root of the conflict in Dantewada and all of Dandakaranya: Is nature’s bounty for the benefit of POSCO and Vedanta and Arcelor, Essar and Tata — or for the people who live there?

One estimate has it that of the 1 lakh families dispossessed and displaced by the bauxite mining operations of one private sector giant, a total of 400 have received Class IV employment in the enterprise. As for the remaining 94,600, kaun jane? Is it then a surprise that 158 districts, according to the Home Ministry’s most recent estimate, are spinning out of the control of the central and state governments, districts that are in the heart of India, far, far removed from the machinations of Pakistan or China.

We must go back to Mahatma Gandhi — or all our dreams of becoming a Great Power might well turn to ashes. We see a stark contrast between democracy and development because as Dr B.R. Ambedkar so shrewdly foresaw at the very moment he reached the apogee of his lifework — the proclamation of the Constitution of our free Republic — from January 26, 1950, we became a society where in political terms we each became equal with a vote that held the same value, but we did not become an equal society in any other sense of the term. Hence the injunctions of the Directive Principles of State Policy in the Constitution — observed principally in the breach. Accelerated growth has accelerated inequalities.

To address this conundrum, Gandhiji gave us the mantra of Panchayat Raj. Nehru, initially un-persuaded, saw the vital need of that within a decade of Independence; Rajiv Gandhi gave the concept constitutional shape; over the 18 years that have passed since the elected local bodies were recognised in the Constitution, nearly 3 lakh “institutions of local self-government” (to quote the Constitution) have been elected. And then left to wither on the vine, the worst con game in history.
We have the shell, not the substance, and apparently lack the political will to bring about the same acceleration in grassroots governance that we have brought about in accelerated growth for the rich and the comfortable.
Which is why the people of India ask India at 64, as the Beatles did:
‘Will you still need me, Will you still feed me, When I’m sixty-four?’

A Moth Eaten Nation: Gopal Krishna Gandhi: Hindustan Times 14 August 2010

http://www.hindustantimes.com/A-moth-eaten-nation/Article1-586835.aspx

A MOTH EATEN NATION: GOPAL KRISHNA GANDHI: AUGUST 14, 2010

Tomorrow,’ he said in Calcutta on August 14, 1947,’ we will be free from bondage to the British, but from midnight tonight Hindustan will be broken into two pieces. So tomorrow will both be a day of rejoicing and of mourning.’ He knew his Hindustan, Mohandas Gandhi. If India that is Bharat is his Hindustan broken in two’, we are the ‘tomorrow’ he spoke of.
Each day — not just the August 15 he had in mind — is a day of rejoicing and of mourning, of thankfulness and of sorrow. A crushing dyad.
What are our rejoicings ?
Let us take the ten major ones.
One, that we are a country of the book — not a little one in red that none dare put down with a smile of dissent, or one that comes in cantos none would care to read un-obliged, but one that is the basis of our people-hood and has stayed close to life and living. The Constitution of India has never been and never will be a bestseller. But if I can write what I am writing and the reader can read or chuck what I have written in freedom, it is because of that book.
Two, that having written and read whatever we have we can differ from its advocacy or its refutation, we can controvert, even agitate for or against it in print and over the new wires and waves opening before us, and even in courts of law.
Three, that we have those courts of law, not just in the one edifice called the Supreme Court of India but in the entire architecture of justice-delivery which, despite 3 million cases yet-to-be-disposed of and the not-so-rare ‘bad egg’, is still a huge guarantor of that precious human need, sunvaai.
Four, that we also have other re-assuring entities, described cumbrously as ‘constitutional authorities’ though often lofty of manner and lumbering of movement, at the very heart of the Republic of India — the Election Commission of India, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, the Chief Information Commissioner, the Chief Vigilance Commissioner, the National Minorities Commission, the National Women’s Commission, the National Human Rights Commission are much more than constitutional bodies.
They are meant to be and are institutions of our collective conscience.
Five, that we have been given and have utilised the chance, election after election, 13 times pan-India and several times that locally, to re-affirm or retract political trust. We have done that with elan and often with éclat, returning candidates or parties with a whoop of joy or dismissing them without as much as a second look. Of how many
countries, not just in our neighbourhood but world-wide can this be said ?
Six, that we have in the shape of our professional services — civil, military and technical — a national grid of enormous scale, which flab, flatulence and fangle notwithstanding, holds the country together as our railways, our radio and our roads do, our telephony and our television do, with Indian science inching its way towards not just the blue verge of daring accomplishments but the green thresholds of everyday needs.
Seven, that in the columns of our newspapers and in the micro-seconds of electronic journalism, the best minds of India are being engaged, often excoriated, in discussion by an increasingly participative readership and viewership , thereby becoming what the forum was in early Rome, a platform for the discussion of public concerns and private cares.
Eight, that concerned citizens (with rank opportunists mixed up among them like weavils in wheat) have become highly knowledgeable and strong specialist lobbies, catalysing, prodding, nagging the administration to do right by the citizen and forming the Fifth Estate.
Nine, that Indian enterprise is utilising the opportunities opening up to it for competitive growth with an impressive concern for standards of production, through R&D that can do us proud.
And finally, Ten. Making up both the bewilderment and the bewitchment of India, is the average Indian who sees in Hindustan , dimly and disjointedly though, a collectivity so massive, a host and an array so vast, a variety and range so myriad and, if you are in the North East, so distant, which only ‘some God’ can supervise but through which, at the same time, runs a chord, a running thread, connecting the individual to something larger than himself or herself.
Despair of it, carp, grumble, grouse, quibble, niggle about it but at the end of the day, and at its beginning next morn, there it is — Hindustan — routinely sluggish, habitually dissembling, commonly uncaring, disfigured by ineptitude, disgraced by bribery but , like the Himalaya or the Sivalik, the Ganga, Brahmaputra or Cauvery, there , for its sons and daughters to live together in.
Reasons to worry
But with the anthem of our self-satisfactions come, like the grim paintings that Tagore made in his late life, sounds that suggest what Gandhi had called ‘mourning’.
If he spoke of Hindustan’s two pieces, the historian in Jawaharlal Nehru also sensed what was coming. Within three months of Gandhi’s assassination, at a meeting in Sevagram on March 13, 1948 he said: ‘Desh ke do tukre to ho gaye, lekin aage chalkar aur bhii tukre-tukre ho jane kaa dar hai.’ (The country has split into two — that is an established fact. But the danger is of further fragmentation in the future’).
But neither of them could have quite anticipated the further breakages between class-divisions and within them, between communities and within them, between human groupings and inter se within their particularisms, between regions and within them, between professions, services, orders, denominations, hierarchies and inside all their labyrinths.
If the Muslim League walked away with Pakistan, Indian fanatics have got away with murder.
The number of people brutalised, abducted, raped or killed in India’s communal riots is known. Or can be ascertained, with varying degrees of success. But does the number of convictions answering for those barbarisms come anywhere near the numbers of the brutalised, the abducted, the raped or the dead?
Who is responsible for this conjugation of the brutalised with the brute, the tormented with the tomentor ? An indifferent constabulary, an evidence-bound judiciary, an opportunistic political class or an inherently sectarian people-hood?
Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Christian India, Dalit, Bhumihar, Gujjar and Tribal India, all of them have within their numbers people who have been hurt. As also some who have hurt as much as they have been hurt.
India is stricken by bipolarities. Of these the most disorienting is that between the Indian who is a victim and the Indian who victimises, the Indian who is traumatised and the Indian who traumatises, the Indian who seeks justice and the Indian who successfully dodges the law across all the divides of Hindustan. Each major community has been a victim here, victimiser there ; martyr here, murderer there. That unfailing (and universal) patent-holder of unself-conscious wisdom, a taxi-driver, put it well: ‘Aaj Hindustan mein shahaadat bant gayii hai.’ (Today, martyrdom stands divided in India.)
Does the Indian ‘mainstream’ realise that in our North East , there is a pantheon of martyrs that could vie with that of the great revolutionary schools of our liberation struggle? Do the people of India that is Bharat, know even the expansions, let alone the aspirations of NNC, NSCN(IM), NSCN-K, UNLF, RPF, PLA, KYKL or PREPAK? They are all just ‘insurgencies’ to those who insist, not incorrectly, that 1857 was not a ‘Mutiny’ but a war, the very first, for India’s independence.
To India’s social forkings have now been added the prongs of State action. Military, para-military or police action to quell insurgencies or militant extremisms resemble the trucks they often move on — heavy, noisy, lumbering, giving themselves dangerously away but also hurting the physical and psychological ground they traverse. They too are dichotomous, regarded by themselves (with justification) as brave and badly bruised, and by others as brutal and brutalising. If a paramil is seen as daringly engaged in the formidable task of retrieving Naxal-affected districts from violence, its name tastes bitter in the valley of Kashmir. If he is seen being bombed and shot by Left Wing Extremists, he is seen by tribals being done out of their lands, as one of the dispossessor’s militia. If the man in olive green is rightly hailed as the reflexive rescuer in natural disaster situations, Manipur has another description for him. One can add to what the taximan said with ‘Aaj Hindustan mein satya vibhaajit ho gayaa hai, satya ka ek tukra yahaan, ek vahaan bikhraa paraa hai.’ (Today, truth has got fractioned in India, one piece of it lies here, another there.)
Beyond the theatres of conflict and trauma, is a far more difficult-to-heal division. And this is between those who live on India’s land and near its resources, and the forces that are now trying to acquire mastery over those. A three-way pact, often sealed by MoUs that do not see the light of day, joins India’s moneyed class with enterprises and the political ruling class across all political parties from the BJP to the CPI(M ). Blinded by the halogen lights of ‘development’, the Triple Entente either does not realise or does not care what, in the name of mining, industrialization and SEZs, it is doing to our arable and forest lands. Food crops to cash crops, forests to mines, water-bodies and rivers to dams and hydro-electricity, may be the highway to ‘development’ ; they are also the road to dispossession and depression, stagnation and suicides. And those cannot but affect all of us, one way or another, sooner or later.
If India seems moth-eaten today, you and I are the eaten and the eating.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a former administrator, diplomat and governor