Shaping India’s New Destiny

In this book, the author, in the backdrop of his vast and varied experience, looks at the major challenges confronting the country after about six decades of her ‘tryst with destiny’. The analysis done indicates how these challenges have arisen, how deep-rooted infirmities of the Indian state and society have remained untackled, how a leadership with a great vision and will has not emerged at various levels of public life and how the current culture of superficiality has prevented the nation from perceiving the dangers that lie ahead. But the book is not restricted to analysis alone. Nor does it limit itself to viewing the fall-out of India’s failed ‘tryst with destiny’. It offers a new architecture for reshaping this ‘destiny’ and looking forward to another tryst. Shri Jagmohan, with his characteristic candour, observes: "The light of freedom about which Jawaharlal Nehru spoke so eloquently on the night of August 14-15, 1947, was too weak to pierce through the darkness created by the heaps of garbage which India had collected in her courtyards during the long period of her social and cultural degeneration." Jagmohan underlines: "The tryst with destiny which India sought earlier has proved to be only an ‘honest trifle’, ‘betraying her in the deepest consequences’. The fall out of the betrayal is manifest in the diseased womb of India’s present-day democracy, in the poor quality of her franchise, in the corruption and callousness of her governance machinery, in the superficiality and short-sightedness of her leadership and in the ruthless strangulation of the aspirations of the Founding Fathers of her Constitution, who wanted truth to serve as "a guiding star for the new republic". He shows how between the poetic vision of 1947 and the stark realities of 2008 have fallen dark and deep shadows and how these shadows can be cleared. He suggests a specific set of solutions for each of the major challenges and also brings out the overwhelming need for regenerating the mindscape of India by way of a second renaissance. He emphasises: "What India needs today is a great leader who would put himself or herself at the vanguard of a new renaissance which, by virtue of its own dynamics, would give rise to a band of ‘renaissance heroes’ in education, culture, politics and other walks of life and fertilise and regenerate the mindscape of India." All in all, here is an insightful and original work of a powerful and profound mind who has seen Indian politics, and studied the economic problems and administration of the country from close quarters and also experienced the rub of life on an extensive scale.