India’s Wounded Polity

The fiftieth anniversary of our Republic is a time for introspection. We have to ask ourselves: Where did we start from? Where did we want to go to? Which road did we take? Where have we arrived? What have we to learn from all the mis-steps during the journey? The overall picture of the polity, as it obtains today, is far from cheerful. It has been our misfortune that the political leadership of India all through the last half – a – century lacked the drive of conviction politics. It did not measure up to either the demands of the present or the imperatives of the future. Short-term policies and resort to political populism brought into being a soft state which bred an attitude of cussed disregard for the rule of law. The system developed over the years consists of interlocking self-exonerating institutions which don’t deem themselves accountable to those to serve whom they were brought into being. Regrettably, most organizations created after independence have, over the years, become instruments of serving only the interests of their internal stakeholder, and not the society to which they owe their existence. India’s Wounded Polity is the personal testament of someone who watched with anguish the drift of the Indian society in the last fifty years in the hope that the inarticulate majority endowed with basic goodness will one day assert itself.