Mahatma Gandhi : Need for serious introspection

Bapu is identified with many values and principles which he practiced with great conviction but at the core were his belief in non-violence (ahimsa), truth, honesty and rectitude in personal and institutional conduct.

Bapu lived and died for secular India. But what happened in 2002 in Godhra Gujrat . The 2002 carnage will remain a blot on the face of India. Even after five years of this dastardly incident, the hapless victims are yet to receive meaningful justice and the perpetrators are free .

Bapu led the country by giving his own example of clean life . But see what has happened to his India . The corruption index accorded to India by Transparency International. India is ranked at 72 and is deemed to be just above the benchmark for "rampant" corruption. Regrettably the world's largest democracy is largely corrupt. The Indian system has become so distorted ,corrupt and manipulative -- that commitment to Gandhian values is considered to be a sure path to failure by young India. Thus corruption is rationalised at every level and the cynical quip now is that if Rajiv Gandhi as an earnest young prime minister in 1985 bemoaned the fact that only 15 paisa of every rupee allocated by the state was actually utilised for the given purpose, the figure has slid down now to five paisa! . An increasingly state apparatus where even chief ministers, chief secretaries and DGs of police have led the charge in (mis)using their high office for personal gain makes mockery of the Gandhian concept of a 'public servant'.

Equitable justice in an independent India -- a Gandhian objective -- remains a mirage and the courts are clogged with pending cases that go back to three and four decades! At last count, the total number of cases pending before courts in India totaled 2,59,00,000 (2.59 crores) of which the apex court accounted for 43,000 and the high courts had 98,00,000 (98 lakhs) pending with the rest floundering in the lower courts. And the degree of corruption and bribery that is rampant in the system makes a mockery of the centrality of the rule of law in a normative democracy. More recently the stand-off between the judiciary and the media over 'contempt' vis-�-vis a former chief justice of the Supreme Court and the tenet of freedom of speech reveals the brittleness inherent in the system and its inexorable drift from the Gandhian dictum of institutional rectitude and transparency in public life.

Wiping the tears of the most oppressed in society and giving them succor remains central to the Gandhian vision and the mismatch between rhetoric and reality in the current Indian context is glaring. The Sachar Report draws attention only to the Muslim community but much the same could be said of many minority constituencies such as the tribals and other disenfranchised groups scattered in rural and urban India.

Gandhi Jayanti calls for a serious introspection by all of us - about the mismatch between the rhetoric and the reality that is India.