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| It’s never our fault | | |
Suhel Seth |
Whenever there is a crisis of any sort in our country, we blame everyone else but ourselves. Indira Gandhi had mastered the foreign hand. Today some in the Cabinet and in the PMO use national security as a favourite whipping tool. I am equally amazed at the reticence with which the governor of the Reserve Bank of India approaches any desire by foreign banks to expand. He believes there will be a lack of monetary control should credit go haywire.
In the oil and gas sector we are very happy about allowing our navratnas to tie up with the L N Mittals and the Hindujas of the world, but will grudge some companies from hiring Chinese workers to lay pipelines. Conveniently forgetting that until some time ago, the Hindujas were persona non grata in this country and certainly were at the centre of many controversies in India and the United Kingdom; as also the controversy that L N Mittal was in relating to his rather suspiciously timed donation to the Labour Party.
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So all this is fine, but security can never be compromised it seems. I am not for a moment suggesting that we need to be reckless, but it is time we grew up. It is time we behaved responsibly and stopped this stupid cowboy approach we have to everything in terms of serious governance. We need to start evolving into the global superpower that we hope to become: BRIC or no BRIC! We need to engage with the international community from a position of gravitas and not as some banana republic that sometimes we are perceived to be. In the good old days, if anything went wrong you blamed the Communists.
In the Indira years if your toilet wasn’t functioning you blamed Pakistan. Then came the Rajiv years, and if anything went wrong you blamed Pakistan and V P Singh: not necessarily in that order. During the Narasimha Rao years if anything was not as it should have been he blamed Sitaram Kesri and so on and so forth. Nowadays, if a petty thief enters our homes we blame the ISI, which is rank stupid. It is almost as intelligent as George Bush blaming Osama Bin Laden for John Kerry’s defeat in the last elections.
I have no question in my mind that the national security adviser, M K Narayanan is an extremely competent man and fiercely nationalistic, but is it right to question Chinese investment at a time when we are so keen to build an enduring economic bridge? Where will all of this Chinese-bashing leave Pranab Mukherjee when the Chinese President comes calling to India at the end of this month? And why are we so afraid of almost every country on the planet save Ethiopia? The issues that must concern us are conveniently ignored.
When I was growing up we were told you can’t take photographs of airports: why? For security reasons. Who on earth will ever do anything to our airports? They are already in such a state that even terrorists will ignore them. How more bombed out can they look? Staying with the subject of airports, our security check-ups are a farce at airports today: they say we can’t carry after-shaves because they might trigger off an explosive. If you look at the kind of food that gets carried onto these planes in our country, the aroma is enough to kill people, not to mention the resultant burping that happens as a by-product.
My belief is we need to worry about the values that are eroding so quickly. We need to worry about crooks in our political system. We need to worry about convicts who manage to get into Parliament and murderers who continue to run restaurants. We need to worry that a contractor of dubious reputation has still not been able to build a connector between Delhi and Gurgaon. We need to worry about hotel land scams that are apparently happening in Noida near Delhi. We need to worry about the lack of primary health and primary education. We need to worry about the fact that India’s capital has begun to resemble a battlefield: half-demolished buildings and rioting on the streets.Let’s for a change worry about real issues and raise red flags about them. Let’s not get alarmed that we the people will be under siege by a hapless chicken wonton.
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