“The State of the Nation”
Summary
This lecture considers an idea of India that is different from the conventional wisdom that most Indians
are fed by the establishment. At a time when India is being lionized as one of the BRIC locomotives of
the world economy, we considers how the lack of a clearly articulated civilizational ethic has damaged
India and caused many of its citizens to lead unnecessarily stunted lives. Can a strategic intent based on
India’s past may enable the nation to thrive in the future?
First, we shall look at the current state of affairs in India from a few angles: why India continues to
harbor the largest cohort of impoverished and undernourished in the world; how the endemic scams
imply a certain sense of urgency on the part of the ruling classes to rape and pillage as much as possible;
and how social mores have undergone a tragic change in the recent past.
Next, we shall attempt to do a root-cause analysis of why this nation, from time immemorial one of the
greatest civilizations that the world has ever seen, has deteriorated so badly. Based on this analysis, we
shall explore briefly what each of us collectively and individually can do to ameliorate the situation.
What tragedy teaches us: Japan’s reaction to the earthquake and tsunami
Even though I wish to speak about India, let me begin this lecture by speaking about Japan. As we all
know, there was an incredible catastrophe in Japan with a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and giant tsunami
that hit on March 11th, causing enormous damage and loss of life. Nevertheless, the Japanese people, in
the face of perhaps the single greatest disaster that has ever befallen a nation, have shown their mettle:
they stood by each other, and helped their compatriots as much as possible.
There have been no riots or violence or looting of shops, as, alas, we saw in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina in New Orleans. There have been no instances of breast-beating and emotional appeals on
television, as we saw during the Kandahar hijacking. There were, on the contrary, examples of ordinary
people acting for the common good – helping those who were homeless or stranded, ensuring that no
one hoarded more food or water or fuel than they needed, and so on. Foreigners stranded in Japan
were extremely impressed by how well the society functioned, how politely the officials responded.
I have been to Japan many a time, and I have developed a great respect for their civilizational ethos. The
thing that strikes me most about the Japanese is their sense of honor. They are an honorable people:
and their word is their contract. Their stoicism and valor in times of need makes me believe that the
nation shall rise once again from the ashes: just as they did after utter devastation post
Hiroshima/Nagasaki.
And the Japanese have been incredibly disciplined. Given the Japanese emphasis on the good of the
community, and on each person knowing their roles and responsibilities, the reaction of the public at
large was precisely as they had been drilled. There was no running around in a panic – unlike what
happened in Mumbai on 11/26 during the Pakistani gunmen’s siege – with nobody in charge, and senior
security officers not following the standard operating procedure. The Japanese knew what to do, and
they did it.
The spirit of India?
Whenever India has a disaster – and we have plenty of them – nobody knows what to do, and
unfortunately everyone simply tries to look out for their own interests, and the government and
authorities do not have contingency plans. Furthermore, nobody plans ahead, even when the
consequences of not doing so are as plain as day: a tragic example is the recent stampede in Sabarimala:
experts have been cautioning for at least a decade that the facilities are inadequate, and suggesting that
alternative plans be made for crowd control. But nobody cares, in particular the government does not
care.
Among the many acts of heroism and selfless service in Japan one stood out. One of the worst-hit spots
is the Fukushima nuclear complex, with at least one reactor in grave danger of melting down. In the face
of a nuclear meltdown, and in that case certain death due to radiation or fire, 50 plant operators and
engineers volunteered to stay on and attempt to repair the broken cooling system. These Fukushima
Fifty, as they are called, show the highest level of courage and honor. And it is not just fifty people, it is a
rotating staff of fifty individuals on duty at any one time. Several have been diagnosed with radiationrelated illnesses, but they carry on.
That level of civic responsibility – and indeed self-sacrifice – is called “yamatao-damashi” or the spirit of
Japan that was displayed by these brave 50 startled me, because I would be hard put to imagine such a
thing in India today.
But it was not always so: there are tremendous tales of courage, but nobody knows about them. For
instance, there was the Last Stand of C Company, 13th Kumaon Regiment, at Rezang-La, Ladakh, during
the India-China war in 1962. Under Major Shaitan Singh (Param Vir Chakra, posthumous) they fought
practically to the last man and the last bullet to ensure that the Chinese would not take Leh.
Then there was the recent anniversary of the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru. They
were hanged by the British exactly 80 years ago, on March 23, 1931, for the crime of daring to oppose
the colonial yoke. Even though our textbooks do not provide a full picture of the valiant and desperate
struggle for independence, from the Rani of Jhansi to Kalapani to the Komagata Maru1 to the Gadhar
1
The Komagata Maru was a Japanese ship commissioned by Indian immigrants, mainly Sikh, to travel to
Canada in 1914, which they were entitled to emigrate to as British subjects. However, in a clear instance of racism,
they were prevented from disembarking at Canadian ports. When the vessel arrived back in Calcutta, the British
authorities treated those on board as dangerous seditionists. At least 20 of them were shot and killed, and the
others were imprisoned.
Party2, we can still marvel that there were men and women who disregarded their own self-interest to
advance a sacred cause: freedom. I am reminded of Shakespeare in Julius Ceasar:
Cowards die many times before their deaths
The valiant never taste of death but once.
But today, that sort of valor sounds positively quaint. If you open up any Indian newspaper, all you read
about are scams of varying kinds wherein the powers-that-be spirit away enormous amounts. That is, if
you ever hear about it – for the pliant and colluding media takes pains to ensure that most malfeasance
is never reported, but is swept under the carpet.
The scale of the loot is absolutely staggering. A financial watchdog named Global Financial Integrity3
estimates that $462 billion has been spirited out of India till 2008, and they note the theft had
accelerated in recent times. That amount of money is roughly half of India’s GDP, which is about a
$1,000 billion. Indeed, some have taken to reporting the latest scams – the 2G Spectrum, the AntrixDevas Spectrum, etc. – in percentage of GDP, as that makes the most sense.
In fact, one may make a case that the ‘spirit of India’ is in endemic corruption. Moral and material
corruption is ubiquitous. For instance, the very people who trot out Gandhi’s ideas once a year on the
day of his death would not recognize those same ideas if they were presented to them on a platter.
Khadi-wearing has now become a watchword not for sacrifice and humility, but venality.
The media also makes a big after every terrorist attack, about the ‘spirit of Mumbai’ or the ‘spirit of xyzcity’. This is not very meaningful – instead of a positive can-do spirit, the fact that people go back to
business as usual the day after the carnage simply means they are resigned and fatalistic – they expect
nothing from the government: they know that the government is not going to protect them, and
therefore it is the silence of the powerless, not the calm self-confidence of the empowered, as in Japan.
Why are wealthy Japanese so willing to self-sacrifice, as compared to poor Indians? Perhaps the
question should be about the middle-classes in both nations, because the poor in India are truly
impoverished and hopeless – you would hardly expect them to have ascended Maslov’s hierarchy4 to
get to self-actualization, since they are still worrying about the basic issues of food and shelter. But then
2
The Gadhar (Freedom) Party was formed in San Francisco in 1913, to agitate for freedom for India. A
number of its members, for instance University of California, Berkeley, student Kartar Singh Sarabha and University
of Washington student Vishnu Ganesh Pingle, were betrayed, caught and hanged by the British in the Lahore
Conspiracy Case in 1915. Sarabha was only 19, and Pingle, 27.
3
“India Lost $462 Billion To Illicit Financial Flows From 1948-2008”, by Samuel Rubenfield, Wall Street
Journal, Nov 17, 2010
4
Abraham Maslov’s 1943 “A Theory of Human Motivation” posits that there is a hierarchy of needs:
physiological, safety needs, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.
the observed fact is that the poor in India are generous: observe how after any accident or catastrophe,
those on the ground are full of praise for how much the local people do for them.
So it is the middle class that has been addled in India, becoming cynical, uncaring, too willing to dismiss
anything other the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest as naivete. Of course, the middle class in India,
as elsewhere, have a disproportionate impact, because they tend to occupy the positions of power and
influence in the executive, the judiciary, the legislature, and the media.
I believe this pervasive cynicism among the Indian middle class is the result of their internalizing an idea
of India that is so grossly at variance with the facts that it is for all practical purposes a hoax; but a hoax
that is so widely believed and propagated as an article of faith that it has become a dogma that none
may question.
In fact, I believe this cynicism arises from a ‘manufactured consent’5, to use a phrase popularized by the
leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky, who used it to denote the stranglehold that the military-industrial
complex has on US policy and US public perspectives. The idea is simple: keep the people ignorant and
in the dark, so that they can be manipulated easily to suit the interests of the ruling class. It usually
involves some sort of an ‘opiate of the masses’ which renders the masses mindless.
This mechanism is clearly in wide use in the US. The average citizen is rendered relatively ignorant of the
world at large because their education system and the media conspire to make them so. This is
important because it enables the elites – the top 5% that constitute the ruling classes there – to make
rapid decisions, secure that they can easily persuade ‘public opinion’. One example of this was when the
Americans decided to attack Iraq: overnight, they persuaded their public that Saddam Hussein (who had
been a friend for years, especially during the Iran-Iraq war) was suddenly the most wicked person ever.
This sort of mass delusion, courtesy of an educational system intended to produce coolies, and a corrupt
media that is hand-in-glove wit certain politicians, is rampant in India as well. For instance, the content
of the entire education system in India quickly destroys any creativity in a student; furthermore it fills
their heads with arrant nonsense about history , ‘soft power’ and geopolitics, and convinces most
Indians that they can are not capable of competing on even terms with people of other nations.
The opiate that keeps Americans sated has generally been television; in the case of India it is cricket:
which, for all practical purposes, has become the national religion. The obsession with cricket has
become a major problem in many ways, and is an example of a syndrome of importing inappropriate
and damaging ideas, which then strangle native concepts.
5
“Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media”, Pantheon Books, 1988, by Edward S
Herman and Noam Chomsky. It posits that media are business subject to the profit motive, and are particularly
vulnerable to government sticks (such as withholding licenses or advertisements) and carrots (such as honors and
allocation of prime properties to journalists, as has been seen widely in India)
In India, the media has become essentially the handmaiden certain political vested interests. So much so
that we really have a media-politician-bureaucrat-industrialist nexus in place: more widespread and with
more of its fingers in every pie than the military-industrial complex has ever dreamt of in the US.
Hunger in India: colonialism by other means
But what might motivate the elites to keep the masses in this state of intellectual slavery or quasicolonization? First, I was once startled to hear a first-hand account by someone I trust about a
conversation they had with a senior Communist leader in Kerala about prohibition, some decades ago.
At the time, there was a movement for prohibition, considering that many men were wasting their
earnings on drink, and anyway, it was considered a social evil.
The Communists were resisting the imposition of prohibition. When this person asked the leader why
they opposed prohibition, the answer was: “If there is no prohibition, there will be no poverty. If there is
no poverty, who will need us?”. That was an absolutely candid, if cynical statement by the politician.
This is precisely what has led to the perpetuation of poverty in India: it is job security for the politician.
And it is not fair to just tar the Communists with that brush. Most political parties in India are leftleaning, and in particular the Congress has a raft of high-sounding schemes, all of which are supposed to
emancipate the down-trodden in society, of which India has a lot. India is home to the majority of the
desperately poor in the world, whereas other nations have managed to lift their underclasses out of
penury and into the middle classes. Notably, China: whatever their crimes, it appears that the
Communists there have reduced poverty quite substantially.
A particularly illuminating comparison is with South Korea. In the 1950’s, the two countries had roughly
the same GDP per capita. And experts comparing the two expected India to do much better than South
Korea which had been ravaged by two wars: World War II and the Korean War. Whereas India, large, not
having faced the devastation of war – the skirmishes with Pakistan did not affect India’s industrial
heartland – looked much more likely to succeed. But what has happened in reality? South Koreans now
have a per capita GDP that is twenty times greater6 than India’s!
Therefore, several hundred million people, who could have been rescued from poverty, continue to
remain in dire poverty. There is a famous statistic that 78% of working Indians live on less than Rs. 20 a
day7; while the percentage has been disputed – another committee put it at a much lower 25.7% of the
population – there is no question that large numbers of people are subsisting on practically nothing. At
the lower end of the scale, that would still be 300 million people – the largest collection of the poor in
the world.
6
According to World Bank figures for 2010, South Korea’s per capita GDP is $20,165, which puts it at 33 rd
in the world. India’s is $1,176, which is 137th in the world out of 182 countries. For more details, see the Wikipedia
entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
7
From the National Committee for Enterprises in Unorganized Sector report of May 16, 2006, as quoted in
many places, including “My data or yours” by M K Venu, Indian Express, Sep 9, 2010
Alarmingly, things are not getting any better for them. Study after study reveals damning numbers
about nutrition and food security8. And surely that is the most obvious thing about a population under
stress – that they are not eating enough, simply because they cannot afford to. The UNICEF says9 that 46
per cent of all children in India below the age of three are too small for their age; 47 per cent are
malnourished, and 16 per cent are wasted, ie they have little hope of a normal life. “Malnutrition is
more common in India than in sub-Saharan Africa. One in three malnourished children in the world lives
in India”.
A recent Harvard University study 10 concluded that “Growth in India’s economy since the early 90s has
not ended under-nutrition among children in that country…”
The Wall Street Journal11 referred to the Global Hunger Index, which shows that India is one of the
nations most critically affected. It is in the same category of ‘alarming’, along with Haiti, Bangladesh,
Sudan, Cambodia and Nepal. Even North Korea is better off! The only nation in a worse category is the
Democratic Republic of Congo (‘extremely alarming’). And China, the benchmark for India, is much
better off at ‘low’ level of hunger of 6.0 as compared to India’s shameful 24.1 (lower than only war-torn
Congo’s 41.2, desperately poor Haiti’s 28.0, and Bangladesh’s 24.2, and it looks like even war-ravaged
Afghanistan and Iran are better off).
8
“Food Security: India can do it”, by Rajeev Srinivasan and P G Rajendran, Eternal India, Feb 2010, Vol 2,
No. 5. http://www.indiafirstfoundation.org/publications/events/Eternal-India/Volumes/V_2_N-5.htm
9
http://www.unicef.org/india/children_2356.htm
10
“Booming economy not helping our malnourished kids: Study”, rediff.com, Mar 11, 2011
http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-booming-economy-not-helping-our-malnourished-kidssays-study/20110314.htm
11
“India can’t fumble its ‘food right’ plan” WSJ Asia, Mar 23, 2011
An even more damning statistic was published recently in the British medical journal Lancet and
reprinted in the Economist. It talks about obesity12 around the world. Although it is a little hard to read,
12
“Global Obesity: An expanding world. How men’s waistlines have grown since 1980”, The Economist, Feb
7, 2011. “By 2008 the rich world had itself expanded, bringing obesity to groups within countries that were
previously considered poor, such as Brazil and South Africa. During that period, the prevalence rate of obesity
among men doubled to nearly 10%. One country has stubbornly resisted this trend. For all its dynamism since India
opened up its economy in 1990, its men have on average become even thinner.”
here is a screenshot:
What this chart says is truly astonishing: there are only three countries in the world (in blue) where
people have grown thinner in the recent past (1980-2008): and these countries are Congo,
Afghanistan, and India!
This should make Indians, and the Indian government, hang its heads in shame: Congo and Afghanistan
are ravaged countries where there are major wars or civil wars going on. (And Iraq, which also had a
war, did better). That India is in the same category leads us to an inescapable conclusion: the Indian
government is at war with its people. And what is the proposed solution? A laughable ‘Right to Food’
bill, while agriculture has been ignored and downgraded for the past sixty years.
In an astonishing irony, the state of the Indian masses, despite all the GDP growth, appears to be no
better than what prevailed under the British, if you consider just the most basic of needs: caloric intake.
While there are no major famines13 unlike under the uncaring British imperialists, chronic
undernourishment appears to be the lot of the aam admi, under the new overlords. This is what
happened under the British: there were millions of people killed in major famines:
Time
13
Numbers of victims
Source of estimate
“Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World”, by Mike Davis, Verso,
London , 2000
1876-79
1896-1902
Total
10.3 million
Digby
8.2 million
Maharatna
6.1 million
Seavoy
19.0 million
The Lancet
8.4 million
Maharatna/Seavoy
6.1 million
Cambridge
12.2 to 29.3 million
Number of victims of colonial-era famines in the 19th century. Source: “Late Victorian Holocausts”
Under the indigenous colonists, it is a slower death. Given the rapid rise in food prices over the last few
years, hunger has grown exponentially. There are a billion hungry people in the world today, and a large
percentage of them are Indians. The State has not been able to provide for this most basic of needs. It is
therefore a colonial, grasping, entity squeezing the common man for its own benefit.
Number of hungry people worldwide. Source: The Economist, Nov 19, 2009
In an update to this graph, a recent issue of the The Economist14 says: “The World Bank has said that
surging food prices have pushed an extra 44 million people worldwide into extreme poverty, which can
often be a precursor to malnutrition. The number of undernourished people could rise to more than 1
billion this year.” Especially given roaring food inflation in India, it is likely that the number of hungry
Indians has gone up proportionately more.
14
“The world this week”, Feb 10, 2011
The curse of the nation: the clever economists and thieving elites
I once wrote15 -- although I might be more charitable now -- that the astonishing cavalierness of the
State was the result of a folly by Jawaharlal Nehru and a coterie of hangers-on, who decided to pursue a
statist model (based on the Soviet Union’s model) of development. Unfortunately, the result was that
the State got into doing all sorts of things it had no business being in: such as running airlines and hotels;
but the State also did not the things that only it would do: such as building roads and ports, and insisting
on universal basic education.
India’s economists – well-meaning though they might have been – thought they were inventing a ‘Third
Way’, neither capitalism nor communism, but something they imagined would be a clever mix of the
two. Unfortunately what they did create was a chimera. India’s allegedly clever ‘mixed economy’ does
not have the positives or either system, but it has captured, in spades, the negatives of both systems.
Thus, India’s ‘mixed economy’ has not had the vigor and ‘creative destruction’16 that characterize
capitalism: in fact, it is deucedly hard for a firm to die, as they linger on as ‘sick units’ far beyond a time
when they should have been shot in the head. Nor does it have the iron discipline that a totalitarian
Communist system (say China) has, which allows it to focus like a laser beam on particular objectives
and to pursue them without deviation.
In point of fact, what India has achieved is the creation of the worst of all possible worlds: gross
inefficiency, the dead hand of bureaucracy, and in the midst of it, tremendous theft through corruption,
and in particular, crony capitalism. You could not create a worse system even if the economists set out
deliberately to create one. (Although a wise economist, Jagdish Bhagwati, once remarked that India’s
curse had been its clever economists: presumably because they couldn’t resist fixing what wasn’t
broken, or fix that which was actually broken.)
It is true that there has been an opening in this sort of impenetrable iron curtain since the economic
liberalization in 1991, when Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao decided that liberalization was inevitable,
and indeed that there was no choice, in the wake of the infamous balance of payments crisis. Several
companies have done well, but there is also a general cause-and-effect relationship: the successes have
come in areas where the State exited.
In sector after sector, where the State either had no presence (as in IT, where the bureaucrats could not
quite figure out how to implement quotas on something as intangible as software, and so left it alone)
or where the State exited or reduced its monopoly (as in telecom, retail banking, airlines or hotels),
15
“The Nehruvian Penalty: Fifty wasted years”, by Rajeev Srinivasan, rediff.com, Jan 14, 2004
http://www.rediff.com/news/2004/jan/14rajeev.htm
16
As popularized by the Austrian-American economist Schumpeter: the idea that companies and
economies evolve, and there is a constant churn on creation of new models and new firms, with older ones that
have reached the end of their useful life being destroyed. This idea has been used to explain, for instance, the vigor
of California’s Silicon Valley, where there is constant innovation, and new ideas rapidly replace old ones
Indian firms have done very well, some of them becoming world-class players. One can conclude that it
was the stultifying dead hand of the dirigiste State that had held them down.
Among these Indian champions, there is no company that has been more respected than the Tata
Group, which has become a flag-carrier17 for the country, especially with its purchase of Jaguar Land
Rover, Tetley Tea and the steelmaker Corus, but even more so with its iconic Tata Nano, which showed a
remarkable level of innovation and forward thinking.
Therefore it is ever more distressing that the reputation of the Tata Group has also been besmirched in
the recent Radiagate scandals. This is on top of the scandal involving Satyam Computer. Thus even some
of the hallowed and well-respected names in industry have been enmeshed in shady activities: this is a
measure of how entrenched and endemic moral and material corruption have become in India. It is the
norm, not the exception.
There have been concerns that large amounts of money due to this sort of wholesale corruption have
been squirreled away in secret Swiss and other European bank accounts. Estimates are that this could
be as much as a trillion dollars, which would be almost $1000 for every man, woman and child in India.
And what does this mean, in real terms?
This is why, 64 years after formal independence, India continues to harbor the largest number of undernourished people in the world, and 5,000 children die in India18 every day. They have been robbed of
their futures and of their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The State has been complicit
in this crime against humanity.
In a hurry? Why are elites making a ‘run on the bank’?
Why has the level of corruption grown so dramatically in the recent past? The best explanations I could
find comes from a Chinese-American intellectual writing about China. It is referred to in a piece in the
WSJ by Bret Stephens19; here is the relevant portion, quoted verbatim:
"Most ruling elites are aware that economic development will result in the emergence of
powerful challengers to power and probably the loss of the political monopoly," writes Chinese
American scholar Minxin Pei in his book "China's Trapped Transition." What follows is a bit
dense, but worth reading carefully:
"Such a realization would prompt the agents of the regime to increase their discount rate for
future income from the monopoly and, consequently, intensify their efforts to maximize current
income while maintaining a high level of repression to deter challengers. In addition, the
17
Interestingly enough, the Tatas had literally been a flag-carrier for India by creating the country’s first
airline, which was the precursor of the State-controlled Air India
18
“15000 children die in India in 3 days”, rediff.com, Sept 22, 2010, http://news.rediff.com/slideshow/2010/sep/22/slide-show-1-in-3-days-15000-kids-will-die-in-india.htm
19
“Beijing and the Arab Revolt”, by Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal Asia, Feb 23rd, 2011
collapse of a foreign regime with similar characteristics may make fears of losing one's own
power even more acute and real. The net effects of the combination of a growing sense of longterm insecurity and the demonstration effects of a fallen fellow autocracy may be those akin to a
run on the bank, with agents rushing to cash in their political investments in the regime,
quickening the collapse of the regime's authority."
This quote provided one with an epiphany: even though the article is talking about the fact that China’s
totalitarians were a little unhappy about the events in Egypt – perhaps seeing in them a harbinger of
what might be in their future – it is still highly applicable to India. The ruling elites in India are entirely
convinced that powerful challengers will emerge, removing them from what they consider their obvious
birthright, the right to rule India.
Therefore, taking Minxin Pei’s argument to the next logical step, India’s ruling elites steal as much as
they can. What if there is no tomorrow? Therefore, let us loot, rape and pillage the economy as much as
possible. The rent-seeking agents of power are doing precisely that. In other words, let us spirit as much
money out of India and into safe havens in, say, Switzerland, before, heaven forbid, we lose our cushy
sinecures in an election.
We are definitely seeing a ‘run on the bank’: consider the unseemly haste with which the ruling elites
have been siphoning off money. The scams are getting bigger, bolder, and more urgent: the report from
Financial Integrity suggests that the scale of loot has accelerated in the recent past. As India’s GDP has
started to grow at the rate of almost 9% a year, inflation has boomed at 20% a year, and the scams have
boomed at 500% a year.
Why? Have the elites people given up hope? Recently there was the curious spectacle of the embattled
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh explaining away the cash-for-votes scam that allegedly led to his
government staying on in power. He claimed that the fact that his UPA had won an election in 2009
even after this scam was broadcast proved that the public has in effect factored that into their
calculations: in other words, he suggests that the public accepts corruption as a matter of course, and
still wishes to have the UPA rule, presumably for other reasons, for instance that the Congress is the
‘natural party of governance’.
If that is so, why is there such haste? It is not the case, of course, that there has been no corruption in
the Indian State in earlier days. The License Raj – that stultifying regime that enabled the wise men and
women of the Planning Commission to specify in excruciating detail who might produce what, when,
and in what quantities – was tailor-made for bureaucratic pilferage. Thus the opportunity for endemic
corruption, as rent-seeking politicians and bureaucrats ensured that they got their pound of flesh for the
favor of allowing someone to set up an industry. There were also famous scams like Bofors.
Why then the desperate hurry? There are two possibilities: one positive, and the other negative. Let us
take the positive one first.
It may well be that the Congress – which is the ruling elite in the context of Minxin Pei’s analysis –
believes that the writing is on the wall for its eclipse. Despite the near-total support of the media, there
are rumblings that suggest that the voter, hurt by rampaging inflation and impaired governance, may
well vote the Congress out of power. In fact, there are persistent allegations20 that even the 2009
elections were not won and fair and square, because there is good reason to believe that the Electronic
Voting Machines could be, and possibly were, manipulated to get any election result desired.
Perhaps as a result of this, there is a certain urgency on the part of the Congress to, as it were, make hay
while the sun shines. Thus they may want to accelerate their revenue-generating activities, especially
when they may involve the one-time sale of public goods such as telecommunication spectrum or
exploration rights for oil. That would support Pei’s contention about “agents rushing to cash in”. They
expect their run to end, and therefore the unseemly haste.
The darker interpretation is much more serious: the elites are like rats deserting a sinking ship, because
they expect that not only will their run end, but it will be end of India as we know it, too. There are many
centrifugal forces in India, and supporters of these abroad (the barbarians within and without) that are
looking to break India up.
India’s hold over many parts of its territory is tenuous. For instance, the State prevented opposition
party members from hoisting the Indian national flag in a square in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, on
Republic Day 2011. In some 180 districts of the country, there are separatist – and in fact anarchist –
Communists active, and some of them are no-go areas for State security personnel.
Chief among the instigators of the ‘break-India’ effort is, of course, Pakistan. They have never forgotten
that they lost their colony, the erstwhile East Pakistan, because of Indian interference, as they call it.
Then there is China. A recent, detailed report from the South Asia Analysis Group21 talks of a Chinese
suggestion that a clinical thrust through Siliguri will detach the entire Northeast including Arunachal
(“Southern Tibet” [sic]) from India, thus removing India from the regional equation with Myanmar and
even Bangladesh.
There is also good reason to wonder if there is an American plan – under pressure from their Christian
fundamentalists – to “do an East Timor” to India. In that case, the predominantly Christian East Timor
seceded from Indonesia in a clearly religiously-motivated civil war. The chances of something similar
happening in India’s Northeast are high: where Baptists and other missionaries, American, Australian
and New Zealander, have created massive Christian majorities through conversion and intimidation.
20
www.indiavem.com has a large number of stories about the possibility that Indian electronic voting
machines can be easily tampered with.
21
“China “Southern Tibet” (Arunachal) ‘invaded’ by India; Separating Northeast from India can be a
response from Beijing – suggests a Chinese blogger”, Paper No. 4390, by D S Rajan, South Asia Analysis Group, Mar
21, 2011
Just as the ‘coalition’ forces have suddenly appeared in Libya, alleging human rights violations, it is quite
possible to imagine a motivated Security Council resolution. Let us remember that, contrary to the
tender sentiments being expressed by those supporting the intervention in Libya, portraying it as
humanitarian, when Pakistanis were murdering22 some 5 million people (mostly Hindus) in the erstwhile
East Pakistan exactly forty years ago, starting on Mar 25th, 1971, the US did not oppose the thuggish
Pakistani forces, who, among other things, tried to ‘improve’ the ‘inferior’ Bengali stock through an
organized campaign of mass rape and
impregnation of Bengali women.
In fact, the US – that is, eminence grise
Henry Kissinger and his boss Richard
Nixon – actually sent their Seventh Fleet
steaming into the Bay of Bengal to
intimidate India. Put East Timor, Libya,
Tibet and Bangladesh together, and a
picture emerges where India’s interests,
or those of Hindus, are not uppermost
in the minds of those who showed so
much compassion, say, for Kosovars et
al in the former Yugoslavia. In other
words, we can expect no help from even the US other than lip service.
That is as far as the Northeast is concerned. There are other fissiparous tendencies. Islamic
fundamentalists, active in Kerala, have already called for a Muslim-majority state in Malabar, and that is
not a whim: they are serious. Increasing ISI infiltration and the call by Pakistanis for creating a
Mughalistan and a Moplahstan and a Nizamistan are not to be taken lightly. Let us remember that the
call by the LTTE for Greater Eelam included Tamil Nadu and Kerala as well. These separatists are serious.
There are a number of groups that have been infiltrated by malign external forces. A recent book by
Rajiv Malhotra23 considers some of them: in particular the ‘Dravidian’ and the ‘Dalit’ movements, both
of which he thinks are being encouraged by Western churches, academics and governments to actively
reject their connections with a pan-Indian identity, as a possible prelude to secession.
Then there is the Red Corridor (as they say, Pashupati to Tirupati) wherein the government effectively
has ceded control to Communist terrorists who straddle the Indo-Nepali border. Despite all their
disclaimers, it is highly likely that these people are aided and abetted by China – so there are those who
22
“Thirty Years of Twilight”, by K V Bapa Rao, Outlook, Mar 26, 2001.
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?211145
23
“Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines”, Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan
Neelakantan, Amaryllis, 2011. http://www.breakingindia.com/
are in effect China’s agents in India (in addition to a large number of self-proclaimed ‘intellectuals’ and
media who regurgitate the Chinese line, including propaganda verbatim from Xinhua.)
If China were to invade India (or for that matter, Pakistan were to drop a nuclear bomb on India – let us
note that Pakistan has more bombs than India, and is accumulating them at a faster rate thanks to
Chinese supply of designs and material) let us not delude ourselves that anybody will come to our aid.
After all, when Japan, which is one of the largest aid donors in the world, suffered its catastrophic
quake, there was very little coming in from the outside world other than platitudes.
Also, let us remember that in 1971, when the UN General Assembly censured India for invading East
Pakistan (which it did only after millions of refugees had crossed over, and the scale of the slaughter had
become clear), the vote was something like 115 to 6 against India. So much for India’s friends in the
Non-Aligned Movement!
It is rather evident that India, like Abhimanyu inside the chakravyuha, is entirely alone. And the chances
for India’s breakup are rather good. After all, half the ‘intellectuals’ in India do not believe that India – or
the idea of India – existed before the British arrived with their guns, germs and steel. Although it has –
there has been an idea of India for millennia, a concrete and well-established national identity.
Is India the new Russia?
There is one more distressing trend that I have noted lately: a series of comparisons of India with Russia.
This is not at all flattering to India. In the post-Cold War scenario, Russia basically imploded, its GDP
shrank, and it became a bastion for buccaneer capitalism, with well-connected individuals in the
bureaucracy and the ruling elites making billions, while the life of the general public deteriorated.
Writing in the Financial Times, a commentator24 suggested that the Russian model where “a handful of
people became very wealthy, conditions for most worsened as national income declined”. In another
article25, there was the statistic that India’s oligopolists have become as wealthy as Russia’s: “the total
wealth of Indian billionaires is more than a fifth of the nation’s GDP, equaled only by Russia”.
Of course, there are several points of difference: Russia’s population itself is shrinking (it has fewer
people now than Pakistan, which is about 1/15th its size), as there is an epidemic of alcoholism, crime
and general social deterioration. India’s GDP and population are both increasing, and there is youth
bulge that will, one hopes, lead to a ‘demographic dividend’ while Russia is facing a ‘demographic
meltdown’ – soon there will not be enough Russian soldiers to defend their long border with China, for
example.
Unfortunately, there is a part of India where the sort of decline that Russia is subject to seems to be
catching on: and that is Kerala. Long famed for its quality of life, Kerala is now getting to be full of
24
25
“India’s heirs of corruption”, by James Lamont, Financial Times, Mar 26, 2011
“It is time for India to rein in its robber barons”, by Jayant Sinha and Ashutosh Varshney, Financial Times,
Jan 6, 2011
alcoholics (the per capita consumption there is the highest in the country); the list of crimes is growing
(for instance contract killings, murders for money, robbery). And the situation for women is
deteriorating in a state that had previously – with its proud matrilineal heritage – been a bellwether.
Violent crimes against women are routine in Kerala. Just within the last two months, a young woman
was pushed out of the ladies’ compartment of a moving train, raped on the tracks, and she was
murdered there, her head bashed in with a cement block. An 11-year old girl was found with broken
arms and marks of severe torture including cigarette burns – it is believed she was purchased for Rs.
15,000 in Tamil Nadu and was being ‘inducted’ into prostitution. She died of her injuries
An engineering student was lured to a remote place by her ‘boyfriend’, where he and three friends
disrobed and raped her, and posted the video on the internet. She committed suicide. A young MBA
student who rejected the advances of a boy was stabbed by him along with her father. Her father died,
she is in critical condition.
If Kerala, long one of the most progressive parts of India, one of the wealthiest too, thanks to its
expatriates’ payments, and one of the healthiest and best educated, is on this steep societal decline,
then it appears there is a real problem: we are at the edge of a precipice.
A failing State?
While I do not wish to be an alarmist, the above litany of woes suggests that India is on the verge of
being a failed State. Consider the following table of failed states26 from The Economist magazine:
Country (population in
millions)
Failed state
index, score
Life
Symptoms
expectancy,
years
Somalia 9.4
114.3
51.5
Anarchy, civil war, piracy
Chad 11.5
113.3
50.0
Desertification, destitution, meddling
neighbors
Sudan 43.2
111.8
59.8
Ethnic, religious strife, illiteracy, tyranny
Zimbabwe 12.6
110.2
50.4
Economic collapse, kleptocracy, oppression
Congo 67.8
109.9
48.8
Civil war, massacres, mass rape, looting
Afghanistan 29.1
109.3
45.5
Civil war, drugs, no infrastructure, terrorism
Iraq 31.5
107.3
70.2
Ruined infrastructure, sectarian strife,
terrorism
26
“Failed states: Where life is cheap and talk is loose”, The Economist, Mar 19, 2011
Central African Republic
4.5
106.4
48.6
Desertification, destitution, disease, terrorism
Guinea 10.3
105.0
60.1
Destitution, drugs, kleptocracy
Pakistan 184.8
102.5
68.0
Coups, drugs, illiteracy, terrorism
Haiti 10.2
101.6
62.1
Deforestation, destitution, crime
Cote d’ivoire 21.6
101.2
59.6
Incipient civil war, post-election deadlock
Is this the company that India is about to join? A giant with 1200 million in population, and a life
expectancy of around 65 years, but beset with illiteracy, terrorism, deforestation, destitution, secession,
kleptocracy, terrorism, interference from neighboring states?
The real idea of India
There is no reason for India, an old and proud civilization, to have come to this pass, where it cannot
feed its citizens, nor ensure its territorial integrity. Why has this happened? Is there no hope? Can things
improve?
The core reason for why things have deteriorated to this extent is one word: deracination. And yes,
there is hope; things can improve: again it can be captured in one phrase: strategic intent.
The real problem is that we have forgotten what made this nation great. It is all the virtues we associate
with a great civilization: respect for knowledge, openness to ideas, a land well-endowed with resources,
and a populace that had a certain civilizational ethos. And it was indeed a great nation: it was the richest
country in the world from time immemorial27 to the 15th century; it had the oldest and greatest
universities; was known for its innovations such as yoga and ayurveda, and for its products, such as
gems, spices and high-quality steel.
It was the richest economy in the world, accounting for a major portion of the world’s GDP:
27
“The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective”, by Angus Maddison, OECD, 2001.
The problem is that there has been a deliberate erasure of this history from our minds. Indians have
been so uprooted that they no longer recognize the ‘idea of India’ that existed for thousands of years –
the nation that astonished the first Europeans to arrive at the opulent royal courts of the Mughals and
of Vijayanagar.
That ‘idea of India’ was that this was the greatest, richest, most benevolent nation in the world, one that
was the country everybody wanted to see before they died.
Instead, the ‘idea of India’ that most of us have been taught, and that we have internalized, is a colonial
construct: the imperialists wanted to justify why they had raped and pillaged an entire civilization, so
they constructed a mythology, that their mission was one of benevolence. They also claimed that they
had chanced upon a continent that was just a bunch of warring tribes, and they had caused the creation
of a unitary State.
Arch-imperialist Winston Churchill articulated this memorably by stating that “India is a geographical
term. It is no more a united nation than the equator”. The colonialists claimed that they had united
India, whereas the reality was that there was an age-old concept of India as a culture and a civilization
that goes way back to the earliest days of recorded history. The earliest settlements in the subcontinent
can be traced back to about 7000 BCE (Mehrgarh at the foot of the Bolan pass) and then there was the
superb urban civilization of the Indus-Sarasvati valley a few millennia later, followed by the desiccation
of the Sarasvati and the movement eastward.
Never has there been any question in the minds of Indians themselves in historical times about the
uniqueness of Jambudvipa and its ‘exceptionalism’. The geographic boundaries of the civilization were
reflected, for instance, in the ashrams set up by Sri Sankara in the four corners of the Indian
subcontinent.
Within this region, the civilization grew and prospered and flowered. Despite all the mischief that has
been rammed down our throats regarding the ‘Aryan Invasion’ hoax – and unfortunately this has
become more or less the official dogma in the country regarding history, thanks to Communist historians
at the JNU who found it convenient to regurgitate the colonialist myth – it is clear to most Indians that
there is a civilizational unity and continuity, which has a wholly indigenous base, although it has quite
generously accepted a lot of ideas from outside.
The biggest problem with this ‘Aryan Invasion’ hoax and other related constructs is that it has given
many Indians an inferiority complex. Somehow there is the feeling that Indians cannot measure up to
those of other countries, specifically whites (and increasingly Chinese). In point of fact, it was manifestly
true in the first fifty or so years after independence: India was a definite also-ran in the world, and its
image was that of a basket case, impoverished and condemned to be “always full of potential” that it
could never realize.
India had nothing to be proud of: it was never at the top of the league in anything whatsoever. In
particular India has been, barring a few exceptions like R Krishnan and Prakash Padukone, virtually
absent in all major sports. This also contrived to give Indians a sense of inferiority: it didn’t look like we
could ever be contenders.
This is why the success of the Indian IT industry has been such a boost to the Indian ego. Suddenly,
Indians were beginning to be recognized as among the world’s leaders in one of the hottest fields, high
technology. In fact, the very image of the Indian has changed: whereas just thirty years ago every Indian
in the West was seen as someone lucky to escape from the grinding poverty of India, now the default
assumption is that every Indian is a software engineer. Or a smart, mathematically-minded person.
Of course, this sea-change has been helped by the very real growth in India’s GDP since 1991, and
especially by the Goldman Sachs coinage of ‘BRIC’ which has helped elevate India from the muck of the
banana republics of the Non-Aligned Movement. In a way, China’s rapid rise has also helped India’s
image, because if former basket-case China can do so well so quickly, why not India as well?
It is now widely accepted that India will be one of the top economies on the planet in years to come. Of
course predictions about that always come with a little small print: this will happen if India fixes its
educational system or its infrastructure; if it is able to deal with the centrifugal forces in the country; if it
is able to ensure that its ‘demographic dividend’ doesn’t deteriorate into a demographic albatross, and
so on and so forth.
But this has still not translated into a clearly articulated goal for Indians to aspire to. The late
management guru C K Prahalad28 came up with a wonderful concept: ‘strategic intent’ along with a
companion concept: ‘core competence’.
Towards a strategic intent for India: what is its core competence?
A strategic intent is a simple, clearly articulated objective that can excite and motivate people. It is a
worthwhile, challenging (‘stretch’) goal that does not change easily over time, and one that is based not
only on what the current situation but also on the potential for the future. It requires reciprocal loyalty
between the rulers and ruled, where they are clear they are working together for a common goal.
India has failed to articulate a strategic intent. This leaves everybody confused about between a
strategic goal and a tactical goal, and this is one of the reasons why Indian diplomats seem to generally
come off worse in their negotiations with others: for instance, at the climate summit in Copenhagen,
and especially in every deal with the Pakistanis.
The Pakistanis actually have a clear strategic intent that they have articulated strongly and forcefully:
they want to dismember India and establish a Mughal sort of kingdom, an emirate ranging from
Afghanistan to Burma, with Islamabad as the imperial capital. That is clear, specific, a stretch goal, and is
based on their belief that Muslims, while not a majority of the population in the subcontinent, will
eventually become one through their high birth rates, and if needed, a judicious ethnic cleansing here
and there.
Whether or not you agree with this, it is clearly a strategic intent, and the Pakistani army and the ISI are
hard at work night and day to make this intent a reality.
On the other hand, Indians have no strategic intent to fend this off, therefore India makes these mealymouthed statements and kind of hopes for the best, as seen most recently in the acclaimed visit of the
Pakistani PM to India to watch a cricket match. While Indians seem to hope that this shows good faith
on their part, the Pakistanis view this (and they are right) as an admission of weakness by India.
Generally, major powers on the world stage have unequivocal strategic intents. The US, for instance,
intends to dominate. Its intent was articulated in a wonderfully pithy statement attributed to George
Kennan, a US State Department person. He is supposed to have said: “The US has 8% of the world’s
population, but it enjoys 50% of its resources. Our foreign policy is intended to keep it that way”.
While the actual quote may be apocryphal, the US certainly acts as though this were the guiding light
behind its policies: to gain control over the resources of the world. This is why, for instance, it gets very
sentimental about the human rights of people in oil-rich Libya, while being not bothered at all about the
human rights of people in oil-less Tibet.
28
“Strategic Intent” by C K Prahalad and Gary Hamel, Harvard Business Review, 1989
China also has a well-articulated strategic intent. It has a history of believing itself to be the center of the
world, the Middle Kingdom, the natural imperial center, with vassal states all around the Asia-Pacific
kowtowing to the Chinese emperor and offering them tribute. This is its vision for the future as well: it
wants to be Number One, no ifs, thens and buts, in everything – economic, military and cultural
strength. And they move towards this goal relentlessly.
Compared to them, India is a naive lamb being led to slaughter. India has never even suggested that it
could be among the top economic powers in the world: it is thanks mostly to the Goldman Sachs BRIC
papers that the very idea – which would have been considered blasphemous by many Indians – has
gained currency.
The fact that Indians have no overarching goal along the same lines as the Americans and the Chinese
have is demonstrated by a simple instance: the Indian attitude to the Olympics. Every other country
sends its athletes to win. Indians are the only people who mouth the pious and utterly meaningless
platitude: “It is important not only to win, but to participate”. And most Indians actually believe this
twaddle.
Indians need to think clearheadedly about a plausible but difficult goal. They should not be blinded by
the situation today, but should aim for the stretch goal, and figure out what they need to do to get
there. An excellent example is the Tata Nano car. It was a stretch goal – which even seemed like an
impossible goal – to come up with a Rs. 1 lakh car. But Tata persevered, and people figured out how to
get there in very creative ways. The Nano stunned skeptics who truly believed its price point could not
be reached.
Another example is Aravind Eye Clinic in Madurai. The founder of the facility, the legendary Dr. V, had an
audacious goal: he wanted to eliminate avoidable blindness among Indians, who constitute the largest
cohort of the blind in the world. He did not tell people how to do it, but he felt that if he could provide
world-class eye surgery at 1/10 the cost, that would be a way of getting there.
It turns out that through a remarkable set of innovations, Aravind has reached that cost goal (indeed, in
rough terms, it costs Aravind $12 to do a cataract surgery, whereas the same operation would cost an
American hospital $1500, and we ignore purchasing power multipliers and so on), but it is able to
provide 70% free surgeries to the rural poor, with the 30% paying customers being enough for the
operation to break even. They haven’t yet reached the strategic intent of eliminating unnecessary
blindness, but they are well on their way to making that possible.
And that, in fact, is part of India’s core competence: ingenuity, innovation, intellectual property
generation, whatever you want to call it. In the current socialist scenario, this ingenuity or jugaad has
mostly gone into clever schemes to beat the malign system, or to dodge taxes, or to make money by
getting the right licenses. But in a more congenial time and place, Indians’ native intelligence has made
them the world’s best idea generators.
It is not for nothing that a large number of Silicon Valley startups are founded by or managed by Indian
immigrants. Under the dead hand of socialism and crony capitalism, Indian ingenuity has been stunted,
but in the hothouse environment of Silicon Valley, it has thrived. As the Indian State retreats – one
hopes – from more sectors of the economy, for instance education, it is quite likely that clever Indian
ideas will once again come to the forefront.
India was one of the leading sources of innovation in the world throughout history, and China was
another. The difference seems to be that India concentrated on abstract thought, while China focused
on the concrete. Thus India invented Panini’s grammar, infinite series for trigonometric functions, and
yoga and ayurveda. China invented paper, printing, the compass and gunpowder. In a world that is
moving towards more conceptual ideas, India’s facility with abstraction may well be a big advantage.
In fact India’s core competence lies in two areas: intellectual property generation and agriculture, both
of which have been ignored by the State in its mad rush for industrialization a la 1950’s-era Soviet
practice. A core competence is something that allows for the creation of a series of offerings that may
be of value in the marketplace. The understanding and enhancement of core competence is a major
weapon used by companies to improve their market position.
Likewise, if India sets is focus on IPR and agriculture, it will do wonders for itself. On the contrary,
education has been ruined in India, and so has agriculture. If the nation had focused on farming, it may
well have avoided the dubious distinction of finding its people growing ever more thin and its food
inflation shooting through the roof, as much as 25% annual for some key food items.
As for education, the virtual extinction of Sanskrit education in India is a massive tragedy because there
are literally millions of palm-leaf manuscripts that are falling apart, which may contain enormously
useful materials.
It is important for India to establish a strategic intent that it will be Number One in the world in its core
competence: education/intellectual property generation and agriculture, and to invest heavily in both. If
it does this, it may well find that it becomes Number One in other areas, such as economic power and
military power as well.
Just one word: governance
The really tragic thing is that in India all the ingredients for success are present, except for one crucial
thing: leadership. If there is good leadership and good, enlightened governance, India could be once
again reach its place at the top of the heap: not one of the top 10, but Number One. The contrast can be
seen in the governance of enlightened monarchs in India as compared with British rule.
When the ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’ were caused by El Nino climate changes that led to drought, the
British were completely unprepared: so in their reign, there were some 31 major famines in 200 years;
however in the previous 2000 years, there had been only 17 famines! Why? Governance. El Nino effects
happen regularly, once every 15 or so years, and this leads to drought in India. But the native monarchs
had governance structures in place to provide cash payments to drought victims; they stored grain in
anticipation and avoided famine. This the British did not do.
The same applies to leadership and governance today as well. If there is leadership that is not worrying
about how much it can skim off from the public purse, then it can something for the public.
How can we ensure there is good governance? Let us utilize the weapons in our hands: the courts, the
Right to Information Act, peaceful demonstrations. Most of us tend to not want to rock the boat. We do
not sue. The legal system is a powerful weapon if it can be wielded properly. If you see injustice being
done, file suit. Be prepared to suffer through the delays in the system, and the occasional crooked judge
and lawyers, but the current Supreme Court, for instance, is an activist court, and it may well listen with
sympathy to ordinary citizens.
The Right to information Act is another useful weapon. When something looks fishy, ask for information.
The secret of a successful authoritarian State is the wall of opaqueness it builds around itself. If it is
possible to breach this, all of a sudden it becomes easier to ensure accountability and responsibility by
both bureaucrats and politicians. So much so that, alas, whisteblowers using RTI are now in some danger
of being bumped off by thugs.
And finally, there is the option of peaceful demonstrations. Whether you are part of an NGO or some
other group, the Indian State is obliged to pay attention if a fairly large number of citizens express their
unhappiness through a polite and peaceful – and that is key – demonstration. As much as the public is
annoyed by pointless political demonstrations and the use of hired men to enforce bandhs and hartals,
it is important to note that satyagrahas and other action do have an impact.
But most of all, what individuals need to do is to organize. I am not necessarily recommending any
political or other organization, but if you look around, you will surely find a few that are doing charity
work or heritage preservation work or environmental work. There is surely no dearth of NGOs in this
country, although you have to be choosy and exercise due diligence: quite a few of them are fronts for
dubious purposes, and are fifth columnists for foreign interests. But there is certainly strength in
numbers, and you can accomplish a whole lot more with numbers than on your own.
Conclusion
In this lecture, we have looked at the state of the Indian nation today, with particular emphasis on the
food situation, the rationale behind the widespread scams, and the deterioration of society. In a rootcause analysis, we have seen how a number of India’s problems may be attributed to an ‘idea of India’
that is a manufactured construct intended to deracinate Indians.
The solution may be the creation of a well-thought-out strategic intent that will enhance the nation’s
core competency, and impel citizens to use their creativity in solving difficult problems. This can lead to
improved governance and leadership. And each of us has the responsibility of actively participating in
the efforts to bring accountability and responsibility to the actions of our rulers.