Editorial, 'WE THE UNDERACHIEVERS' in LAW ANIMATED WORLD, 15 August 2012, Vol. 8, Part 2, No. 15 issue

WE THE UNDERACHIEVERS

on any count, if not totally failure statues, have to pause and seriously introspect as to what went wrong with us in confidently marching to our tryst with destiny and redeeming the pledges to the nation made by innumerable freedom fighters for its full independence, true democracy, economic prosperity, social justice and peaceful progress. No point in just engaging in any blame-game; ‘we the people’ have to collectively rethink the strategies and tactics to be adopted in our struggle for an egalitarian social democracy - the vision of our national leaders of various hues – like Gandhi, Bose or Bhagat Singh – instead of the current drift towards a rabid exploitative, eco-destructive capitalization process in sad imitation of the greedy and over-consuming West which achieved all its prosperity by downright swindling and pillage of the vast majority of global population in colonial times and continues to do so even now. It is true, as Pranab Mukherjee stressed in his presidential address to the nation on the eve of this 66^th ‘independence day’, that British imperialism did wrought havoc; our economy, thriving in the 1750s with ~ 24% of world’s manufacture to our credit, was smashed down to a mere 1.7% level by 1900 and our growth rate during 1900-1947 was hardly 1% p.a. from which point we have come a long way to the ~ 8% growth in the last 7 years period. However, even smaller countries of Asia, not to speak of the bigger China, have outpaced us in developmental/distributive achievements and are able to showcase neater and more orderly models of growth. Especially in the last three decades we are on a degenerative dissolution phase with what communal, casteist, regional and other divisive factors dealing telling blows to the fabric of the nation and the canker of corruption eating away the very vitals of the society. Unless we imbibe the spirit of the universal man espoused by the Kannada rashtrakavi Kuvempu and, applying it to our specific conditions, seriously fight corruption in the society together with waging war against divisive factors and poverty, unless we feel and breathe the spirit of unity irrespective of the various class/caste/communal divides, ‘we the people’ of India cannot secure real redemption §§§