Listen to this article:

The prime minister’s speech from the ramparts of the iconic Red Fort built by the Mughals was shorter than his earlier speeches. It was possibly the case because the recent youth movement has undercut Bharatiya Janata Party’s triumphalism just a month back. The PM addressed the youth but not the challenges that the youth movement pointed to. He started with the slogan of ‘Viksit Bharat’ and ended with it. But the youth movement points to the impossibility of achieving it given the crisis in their lives.

Why is youth in India still protesting on the eve of the 80th year after it attained political freedom to pursue what is good for it? During this time, many other nations that started their journey along with us have achieved far more. It can be said that India has faced far more complexity, not only due to internal diversity but also due to the rapidly changing global context that it has had to navigate during a time of unprecedented technical change and strategic shifts.

India at Independence emerged from colonial disruption, entrenched feudalism, lack of experience of running a democracy, widespread poverty and illiteracy, lack of technological capability and under development in every sense. It also encompassed massive diversity – regional, linguistic, religious and economic – which it had no experience of managing. Eighty years later, much has changed but the challenges are no less.

Challenges persist because the ruling elite emerging from colonial rule was under the sway of western modernity and wanted to copy it rather than try an indigenous modernity as Gandhi suggested. It adopted a trickle down model which marginalised large sections of the population who were poor, illiterate and suffered ill health, but silently accepted the model in good faith. 

Transplanting a model which the West had evolved over a few centuries was fraught with difficulties for India with its very different starting point. The initial conditions in India in 1947 were vastly different from what Europe’s conditions were when it started its modernisation. It was in the midst of the industrial revolution, the feudal hold on society was weakening and it was not weighed down by debilitating colonisation. In fact, colonisation enabled Europe’s development through access to additional markets, extraction of capital from colonies and it exported its surplus labour to the United States of America and the colonies. India suffered from a ‘disadvantage of a late start’.

India’s adoption of an inappropriate model of development led to new challenges. While education, health, infrastructure, urbanisation, etc. improved, the gains have been largely cornered by the ruling elite, legally and illegally. The vast majority has lagged behind resulting in increased inequality in social, political and economic terms. This has been facilitated by growing elite capture of policies and the increasing non-accountability to people. To achieve this, the institutions of democracy have been hollowed out through subversion of elections, legislature, judiciary, police, bureaucracy, media and institutions of higher learning. 

While maintaining form, democracy has been increasingly subverted. For instance, elections are manipulated so that only the representatives of the vested interests win, thereby marginalising the marginalised. They enter the legislatures through the democratic route of polling the largest number of votes – but only after that they work to favour those who financed their elections. And, election victory is increasingly dependent on who can spend more, and of late, what can they offer to people – bribing the electorate to get its vote.

The ruling elite that emerged from the national movement understood the plight of the poor and that they are not to blame for their predicament. So, it was accepted that the nation would have to help them modernise via education, health, work, etc. and that the government should play this role. However, elite capture of policies led to failure. For instance, all children were to be in school by 1965. But even today there is child labour and school dropout. ASER report points to the inability of........

© The Wire