Our enemy's best friend

BY RAJEEV NANDA

25 July, 2005: I’ve always wondered – why does India not make progress like the rest of the world? Almost all the nations in the world started off at the same level after WWII. Given India’s rich history and knowledge we should have leapfrogged the world and should have been one of the leading super-powers somewhere in the last century! We gave the world ‘zero’ and ourselves got stuck right there! Our epics & Vedas talk about nuclear power, airplanes and we let everyone else build them much before us! Even today, we are the acknowledged leaders in brain-power but unfortunately that is confined to four walls of our office and is never applied for our own benefit.

Contrary to the media and our esteemed leaders who would like to blame all this and more on some ‘enemy’; I am of the opinion that these wounds are self-inflicted. The question I ask is - do we really need enemies? Looking at the political, infrastructural & economic progress of our country I would say that we do to ourselves what our worst enemy could never imagine doing to us. In fact, I would not hesitate to declare that we are our enemy's best friend!!! You may be in doubt and may question my sanity, but let's probe a little and you'll agree that my argument holds water.

Terrorism is rampant around the world. Consider the difference in reaction to a terrorist attack in the west vs. India. When there is a terrorist attack in the west, the political leadership went into overdrive to hunt down the terrorists groups and nations that support these groups. Consider the equivalent event happening in India. Handful of terrorists kill few of our people and then our political leaders go into overdrive to kill hundreds more of our own people, burn our own shops, bring our own country to a standstill with bandhs that inflict economic losses in crores and not to mention the black eye we get from world attention! The people we kill in riots are not the enemy, but Indians. The shops we burn, the women we rape, the houses we tear down and the businesses we impact are OUR own and not the enemy's. Ironically, our leaders proclaim all this nonsense as a victory against the enemy!!! How stupid can we get?

The second demographic I would blame is the public. We are too complacent and too uninvolved in making of our own country. The educated class does not vote and then cries fowl when the crooks become the leaders. We watch everything from the sidelines and not do anything to fix the wrongs we see. It appears that hope is our only strategy and we keep hoping that someone else will come around and fix our problems! We keep doing what we have been doing and expect different results every time. We spend more time, energy and money into breaking laws than abiding by them.

Democracy is built by people and their contribution does not just end with elections. The citizens of a democratic nation have equal responsibility in building & managing the nation and serve as a watch-dog to keep the elected leaders in line. The citizens of any nation can impact its progress in simple ways by actively participating in doing what is right for the country and shunning away the bad practices.

Next time you pick up the news paper or a magazine read closely. Analyze the decisions and actions of our elected leaders. Check out the details of stories that the media is reporting. Think deep and think through and then decide; are we serving our own interests or the interests of our 'so called enemy'. Before you think about the short-term gain, think about the long-term losses and then, I'm sure you'll understand my point of view that we are our enemy's best friend'!

BY RAJEEV NANDA