A) Politicians
" Spirituality is India's only politics, the fulfilment of Sanatana Dharma its only Swaraj. ", wrote Sri Aurobindo in 1911 (India's rebirth,89). In the old times, princes and kings were Kshatriyas, their duty was to serve the nation and high ideals were held in front of them by the Brahmins and rishis who advised them. The Buddha's father for instance, was a king elected by its own people Yet what has happened to Indian politicians ? Today we see corrupt, inefficient men, who have lost track of the good of the nation they are supposed to serve, who are only interested in minting the maximum money in the minimum time. Nowadays, Indian politicians have often become a caricature, which is made fun of by the whole country. They are frequently uneducated, gross people, elected on the strength of demagogic pledges, such as promising rice for 2RS a kilo, a folly which is draining the state's coffers, or of playing Muslims against Hindus, Harijans against Brahmins, as in UP and Bihar. Politicians in India (and often elsewhere), are most of the time ignorant; Ministers have customarily no idea about the department they are overseeing. It is the civil servants who control matters, who know their subject thoroughly. You have to work hard to become a civil servant , study, pass exams, then slowly climb up the hierarchy, hereby gaining experience. The politician just jumps from being a lowly clerk, or some uneducated zamindar to become a powerful Minister, lording over much more educated men. There should be also exams to become a politician (but what if they are rigged like in UP !); a minimum of knowledge and skills should be required of the man who says he wants to serve the nation (but it must be said that in France for instance, where all politicians come from fancy schools, there is also corruption). Of course, they are exceptions: men of talent and integrity, who strive to serve India to the best of their abilities, who are technocrats first and politicians second. Mr Manmohan Singh is of course such a man, whether one agrees or disagrees with his brand of economics. India should adapt a Presidential system, where the President can chose his Ministers, who will not be necessarily MP's. And what about the habit of Indian politicians of declaring holidays at the drop of the hat ? The seven days mourning for the death of Moraji Desai, a man who after all lived a full hundred years, who was universally hated by the Congress, for betraying Indira Gandhi, and who did not achieve much during his short tenure, cost the nation thousands of crores, when she could ill afford it. India must be the place in the world where there are the most samadhis, where each year, time and money are wasted to celebrate the death anniversaries of people which have been completely forgotten and who often did not achieve anything worthwhile in their lifetimes. 5 minutes of silence in all offices should be enough to pay respect to the memory of any important figure who dies. India is probably the place where there are the most holidays, legal and otherwise. In Madhya Pradesh for example, it has been calculated that there are more leave days (holidays, strikes, bandhs, leave), than working days !
There is also nothing which symbolises better the degeneration of Indian politicians than the VIP syndrome. The protection that most politicians enjoy today, stems from a genuine concern; it was born out of the trauma of seeing Indira Gandhi killed by her own bodyguards; it sprang from a sincere desire to protect future Indian VIP's from such a fate... But it still must be said that once again perversion has taken over, that man the political animal has misused what was in the beginning a genuine movement. And the result today in India, is that the smallest VIP has to have his three black cats around him, for it has become a symbol of status. Tremendous amounts of money are spent on security, untold miseries thrown at the hapless Indian citizen, who has to stand for ages in traffic when some VIP convoy is passing by, who is made to wait for hours inside his plane while a VIP's plane is coming in. Today the VIP security syndrome is like a many-headed monster which is eating at India's entrails, it is an asuric force which is doing exactly the opposite of what it should do, as it is catering to a few elite persons at the detriment of India's people. This monster, for the benefit of a few individuals, makes everybody suffer, bleeds the nation's coffers and makes a mockery of democracy. Mr Rao must be today the highest protected head of state in the world. Even the Swiss laughed, when Indian security asked them to close to traffic the entire highway from Zurich airport to Davos where the PM went a few years back for an economic meet; " we don't even do that for the President of the United States ", they told them. Yet in India, nobody finds anything to say to that practice. When Mr Rao went to Punjab, in April 95, there were one hundred thousand policemen to protect him ! In fact, the Indian police themselves will tell you that 70% of their time is spent on VIP protection...And what about his other habit of chartering a full jumbo jet from Air India for his travels abroad? And when a technical snag occurs, the Prime Minister finds it quite normal to requisition another one on the spot, throwing into disarray hundreds of passengers, including many foreigners, as Air India's planes have a round the clock schedule. Cannot the Prime Minister have his own plane, even if its is more modest than a Jumbo jet? Why does he need a 400 seater plane anyway ? India after all is a poor country. (The last Prime Minister of India, Mr Gowda, who lasted only eight months, managed nevertheless to take along his entire family on several " official " trips). True, after the murders of Indira Gandhi, and Rajiv Gandhi, the combined threats of Sikh, Kashmir and LTTE separatism, all precautions should be taken for his protection. But generally, the leaders of India know about karma, fate, reincarnation and the laws of dharma. Do they not believe then like all good Hindus, that death is preordained, that no matter how many precautions you have taken, Yama will come anyway if it has been fated ? Why does India have to always ape the West who has no such knowledge and just thinks that life is a one way shot, with heaven or hell as its reward. One understands Mrs Jayalitha's concerns about her own security, after all, she was instrumental in clamping down on the LTTE's presence in Tamil Nadu and it was very courageous of her. After all, she saw Rajiv Gandhi blown away in such an horrifying manner. But her own security has gone to extremes and is inflicting tremendous trouble on the ordinary man. When she goes to the Madras airport, the road is blocked for hours. Recently, when all her Ministers travelled to Madurai for that World Tamil conference which should have been called the beatification of Jayalitha, traffic was diverted all along the road and a policeman posted nearly 100 meters. The newspapers even talked of a thousand car convoy in 1993. Can you imagine how much manpower and cost to the state did that incur? Without speaking of the fact that the threat of the LTTE has been used by her sycophants for clamping on political opponents and asserting their own power. Even flying of motorised microlight has been banned over Madras for fear that someone will drop a bomb on her house ! India is the land of wisdom and spirituality, the land of knowledge; and some common sense has to prevail. How can it be that all ministers have each five black cats? Security has to be withdrawn from all VIP's, except for the very few top people who are known to be specifically targeted. And even for those, such as Mr Rao or Mrs Jalaylitha, it has to be reduced to human proportions, keeping in mind the trouble incurred to the common man and the cost to the nation. Because after all these politicians were elected by that very common man to protect his interests!
One should also say a word about Sonia Gandhi. Extraordinary dignity, when her husband died such an appalling death. And what a grief she must have gone through in her heart; thus, she deserves the nation's sympathy and gratitude. It is also a wonderful idea to use the goodwill her husband's name still generates to promote arts or to help disabled children. But what game is Sonia playing? She should once and for all come out with an irrevocable statement that she is not interested in politics and that she will not enter that field. Let her daughter show later if she has inherited the mantle of her grandmother. Instead Sonia is letting Congress politicians use her for their own selfish purpose when they are clamouring that she becomes the party president, thereby opening the door for an Italian lady, who although, she speaks very good Hindi and dresses as an Indian, has very little political experience and appears to be in ignorance of India's true inner greatness. Does anyone know Sonia Gandhi's opinions about Mother Theresa, about he role of Christian missionaries in India and what she really thinks of Hinduism? It would be interesting to take cognizance these before entrusting her with any political role. And also this Janpath house business, with its dozens of security guards at all time of the day and night, its sycophants and secrecy, has become a joke. It has turned into a centre of power and even some Congress Prime Ministers have been known to run there to justify their actions. Let Mrs Gandhi enjoy a quiet house with a minimum of security for her children and let her withdraw from public view and quietly go on with her work.
And finally one has to quote again from the great Avatar of our era: " I have no doubt we shall have to go through our Parliamentary period in order to get rid of the notion of western democracy, by seeing in practice how helpless it is to make nations blessed... It is only when this foolishness is done with, that truth will have a chance to emerge and a really strong spiritual movement begin as a prelude to India's regeneration... " (India's rebirth, P.89) And truly, India will get rid of her corrupt politicians; only when she accepts that she made a mistake by adapting blindly all the political structures which the British had put in place to govern this country; it is only when India starts experimenting with her own ancient systems, which have been adapted to today's problems, that an efficient and honest government will spring from her bosom, ready to do service to Mother India, in the old Kshatryia spirit. It is only when India will see through the shortcomings of democracy, that she will get rid of the bureaucrats (*) who are eating up her entrails.
B) People
Individually, Indian are the most wonderful people in the world: full of hospitality, gentleness, innate spirituality. But whatever happened to the collective consciousness of the nation ? The gap between the very rich and the extremely poor is constantly widening nowadays, thanks in part to the economic liberalisation. If only the very fortunate would care for their less flourishing brethren. But it needs Mother Theresas' and books like the City of Joy to remind us that the dirty work in India cannot be done by its own people. This widening gap, this sickening unconcern about the other, was most evident during the plague of 94. This plague was actually a boon, a divine warning; because what did it show us ? That in the Malabar Hill district in Bombay, which has become the most expensive Real Estate property per square foot in the world (yes, even before Tokyo), people were still dumping their garbage on the street, without a second thought. That next to Malabar, there lies one of the worst slums of Bombay and that none of privileged who live in Malabar had a thought for them during the plague. That in Surat, one of the richest cities of India, thanks to the diamond trade, its citizens let the most filthiest filth accumulate, without thinking twice what it will do to those who live near it. That India is a vast dump of garbage. Not because it is too poor to process it and store it properly, BUT BECAUSE IT DOES NOT CARE, BECAUSE THE TAMAS IN THIS COUNTRY IS SO VAST, SO DEEPLY INGRAINED IN THE COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS, THAT NOBODY GIVES A DAMN FOR THE OTHER. Probably the best instance of that indifference, was a man chose to marry his son aboard an Air India plane, for lakhs a rupees, a shameful act, when India was losing because of the plague billion of dollars in cancelled tourist groups and industrial contracts. And did India learn anything from the plague ? Unfortunately, the answer is no. The country is still as filthy, everything is back as before (even in Surat) and Indians have not understood that the wealth of the country has to be shared to avoid a human, social and ecological catastrophe.
Indians show also very little civic sense in other domains of their life. Look how they drive. Truck and bus drivers in India, routinely overtake in curves endangering not only their passengers' lives, but also those of incoming traffic. They park most of the time in the middle of the road when they have to stop, without any concern for those who are coming behind They drive us deaf with their constant blaring horns and generally have a total disregard for the others. And does not the way one drive, show a nation's vital soul? When an Israeli, who said that everything happens in his country with guts, asked his Indian counterpart how it was done in India, he was told: with luck ! And it is true that there is some divine grace in India, borne out of the centuries of tapasaya o its yogis, to reach safely on its roads from one point to an other. And the bus driver who overtakes in the curve, must be unconsciously knowing it... Look also how Indians are in the habit of pushing other people, whether it is to enter a plane, or exit a cinema. Or how they so innocently ignore those who have been queuing for hours at some railway counter, by jumping at the head of the queue. And it is not only the poor, but also the rich, who have this habit, witness the checking in at airports. Dishonesty is also a lack of collective discipline. Glimpse how the Indian man is often cheating, whether it is the cement which is mixed with ashes, the change not tendered exactly, or the rich man who swindles the Income tax, by keeping lakhs of black money, gold and jewels in his house, when he could very well afford to pay a little more taxes and put his money in his bank? It is said like this that one third of India's wealth is in the black. For make no mistakes, India is a wealthy country. The poverty is only there because of the mismanagement, the dishonesty, the tamas and the inheritance of wrong structures. For Indians must be with the Jews the best savers in the world. And they don't save in abstract concepts: they go in for solid gold, land, cash - and that from the little shopkeeper to the business magnate. Where is all this money going? Again lack of discipline, lack of concern for the nation, disregard for what one's egoism will do to the country.
And finally, another area where India has miserably failed is Sports. One sees the energy of a nation in sports. And what happened in India ? It thrives in sports inherited from the British, such as cricket, which is totally unsuited for Indian climates. And it neglects its ancient sports such as kalaripayat, the ancestor of all great Asian martial arts, and one of the most wonderful and comprehensive sports in the world, which is still practised to day in Kerala (see chapter 14). Furthermore Indians do not have the discipline to practice hard, they lack the drive to excel and the determination to win, again Tamas.
C) Is India heading towards ecological disaster ?
All right: India is going to overcome its colossal indiscipline, her people will rise, her politicians will change; she will also last through all internal and external threats. Thus, whatever foreigners and India's own "secular" Indians say, the land of Bharat, the cradle of the mighty Vedas, the Mother of so many saints, poets, great artists, philosophers, revolutionaries, will survive. After all, it has already come through the unspeakable barbarism of countless Muslim invaders, the soul-stifling British colonial rule -and 40 years of "secular" socialism.
But then what? For what? By the middle of next century there will be no more forests cover left in India. Its population will have long crossed the billion mark and will overflow everywhere, stifling any progress, annihilating all efforts. India's cities will be so polluted by their millions of cars that it will be impossible to breathe any more. India's rivers will be so poisoned by industries, that all living life will long have disappeared from it. There will be no drinking water left, except imported mineral water. And India will be littered with so much plastic (bags, bottles, buckets, etc.), that it will be materially impossible to ever get rid of them (indeed the land of Bharat should be renamed " the civilisation of plastic "...) This is 21st century India for you.
Dr M.S. Swaminathan for instance, the internationally-acclaimed farm scientist, has painted a bleak picture of India's ecology today. He points out that hardly 11% of India's classified forests have adequate density (in 1950, 1/3 of India's area was still forested; each year India loses through deforesting a territory bigger than France, that is nearly two million hectares). And of these, he says, only 3% is protected... And even that 3% he adds, is in deep distress, because of population pressure, big dams (like the Narmada), and industries. Dr Virendra Kumar, Director Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Mountain Environment, New Delhi, says that the main culprits of the deforestation are the contractors, the ones with big money, particularly the saw mill owners. He adds that the Forest Department, although it claims that it does selective tree felling, has absolutely no understanding of ecological balance. Dr Kumar cites the case of the Himalayan Yew, a rare tree, whose bark has anti-cancer properties. Its cutting has been banned in the United States; so the American pharmaceutical companies have turned towards India and started chopping these trees on a massive scale.
But all these scientists, maybe because they depend on government grants for their functioning, are mild in their words. For without doubt, the greatest culprits of the massive deforestation, the dwindling of animal life, the thinning of underwater tables and the increasing desertification of India, are again the work of politicians, in connivance with the contractors, who in turn bribe the forest officers, witness how Veerapan was able to plunder the forests of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka for ten years. The Konkan railway, the Narmada Dam, or the planned beach resort in Puri, Orissa, (for which 25000 acres of forest, holding the sand dunes will have to be cut), the increase of the prawn farms, are all examples of these criminal wrongdoing. And unfortunately, (bare for Mrs Gandhi, who was the only Green Prime Minister India ever had, and Maneka Gandhi, who was its best Environment Minister -and should be reinstated immediately by any government in power, be it Congress or BJP), the Congress must be held in greater part responsible for the slow killing of physical India. In fact, there have never been as many harmful projects to ecology as lately. Did you know for instance that the Asian Development Bank is funding a four-lane highway between Calcutta and Kanyakumari, called the "East Coast Road", which will create havoc with India's coast line? Already thousands of trees have been cut on the Mahabalipuram-Pondichery stretch; fields have been bulldozed; houses have been destroyed; entire villages sometimes are to be expropriated. How could the Central Government approve of a road so harmful to India's interests? The committee for saving the East Coast, wrote letters to the Environment Ministry, sent telexes, faxes, spoke to the secretaries, but the Minister of Environment never received the people who wanted to preserve India's environment...So let's face it: in 30 years, we will all die of suffocation, or we will put a bullet in our heads because India will not be any more the place where we can live. Fortunately, there is a growing ecological awareness in India, and movements led by Medha Patkar, Shri Baghuna, or the lawyer Mehta, who are doing wonderful work. But they often stand alone, because as long as the people of India will not be educated, their work is doom.
But ultimately, is it fair to blame the Congress, or even the British (who nevertheless started the massive deforestation for their railways and killed hundreds of thousands of tigers)? Is there not something else in the Indian psyche that is to blame? Where is the root of this massive unconcern for one's environment; this total disregard for beauty, whether it is the terrible ugliness of the cities in Punjab, or the appalling filthiness in Tamil Nadu ?... And, maybe, for once, the Hindus are to blame. The Ganges seems to be the perfect illustration of a religion which enjoins a thousand purification rites and yet has allowed her own Mother earth to be defiled. Here is a river that Hindus have held most sacred for centuries, nay millenniums; to bathe in it is to purify oneself of all bad karma; to die here is to be reborn in Light. Yet what do all Hindus do with their sacred Ganges? They defecate in it; they throw in all their refuse; they let their dead float down the mighty river, AS IF THEY THOUGHT THAT THE SPIRITUAL PURITY OF THE WATER CAN NEVER BE OBLITERATED BY MATERIAL DIRTINESS.
Why this contradiction? Why this immense paradox which may be indeed at the root of India's sure slide towards ecological catastrophe? Not the politicians, nor the British, but an apparent flaw in the Hindus' mentality? Sri Aurobindo believed that at some time in their history, the absolute, intense aspiration of the Hindus for the beyond, their eternal quest of God, got so one-sided, that they started neglecting Matter. India's sages began thus withdrawing more and more in their lofty caves in the Himalayas, her yogis slowly lost track of the physical envelope, this earthly body, which after all holds the soul and is the sacred house where we live and has to be kept clean and healthy -and neglected this earth, which gave us so much beauty and hence has to be preserved and protected as the symbol of gratitude from our soul... ...And gradually, an immense inertia, a terrible indifference, a great tamas overtook India. It is this great Tamas, this tremendous spiritual negligence for the Material, that allowed successive hordes of Muslims to sweep over India. It is this disinterest to the worldly that permitted the British to submit her for two centuries. It is this apathy to the physical, that tolerates today India's rape and plunder by those politicians, who are messing up Her future and jeopardising Her very existence. But Sri Aurobindo also tells us that it was not always so. the Rishis of the Vedas cared both about the worldly and the other-worldly. They has been farther than any seer in ancient history, yet catered to the material:: "O son of the body, O Fire, thou art the Son of heaven by the body of the Earth (Rig-Veda III.25.1.). Thus once, India was a land of beauty and abundance; its inhabitants had respect for its trees, its animals, its water, because they believed that everything was God. Her forefathers had devised spiritual guidelines for all aspects of life, from the highest to the lowest: the great art of Hata-yoga which has come down to us throughout the ages, or the ancient medicine of Ayurveda, are symbols of that ancient all-encompassing divinity in life.
But this India of old is not dead. Sri Aurobindo asserted that India's dharma is still alive and that a great spiritual Renaissance is bound to take place. When, this renaissance materialises, when Indians wake-up and open their eyes to their great destiny, when the Spirit of the land of Bharat will look again at Matter, then will India's environment be redeemed, as if by magic. For the circle will have been completed and the Great Seers' prophecy will have come through: " "He is the child of the waters, the child of the forests, the child of things that move. Even in the stone he is there (Rig-Veda I.70.2).
So much has been said against Indian bureaucracy, that there is nothing much new to utter. Bureaucrats stifle India, nothing is done without these small babus who sit in their dingy little office with their lunch tiffins, amidst a thousand dusty files. The hapless Indian cannot function without having to bribe these petty men, whether it is to obtain his driving licence, an import permit, or a telephone connection. Ultimately, it is hoped that the era of liberalisation and computerisation will bring an end to their reign, or at least curtail it. But is it sure? A babu with a computer can be even more deadly !
** Auroville, the International city near Pondichery founded by the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1968, and where a 1000 people from 25 countries live together, has shown how fast the earth can be redeemed, even when the task looks hopeless. When the first settlers arrived, Auroville was a barren plateau of red earth, with no trees left, except a few palms and one or two banyans. Yet old temples still showed records of a once abundant land with forests and wildlife. But indiscriminate tree cutting and heavy monsoons, washed away all the good topsoil in the sea, creating huge canyons and the water table had gone extremely low. The early Aurovillians first stopped the rain water from washing into the sea by erecting earth bunds wherever they could. Thus the water table slowly went up again. Then, they proceeded to plant a million trees, protecting them with thorns from goats and cows, which are a mortal danger to India's ecology. When these trees started growing up, they shed their leaves, which with the help of rain water, started rotting on the ground, recreating in a few seasons a fertile topsoil. Today Auroville is a vast forest, animal life has come back, the canyons are slowly filling up, and villagers have so much firewood, that they do not cut trees any more. Yet these same villagers still keep on planting cashewnut crops, a harmful tree, which has to be sprayed many times with deadly pesticides and whose only value is its international market price. Yet villagers still let rain water flow in the sea and use cheap compost, mixed with plastic bags, hospital refuse and other non-disposable trash. EDUCATION is the word; the Indian Government has got to educate its villagers on the value of the sacred land that is India. India is slowly killing its most precious possession, as no Muslim invader or European coloniser, ever managed to do. Without its land, India will be like a great soul without a body, unable to manifest itself.
* A word must be said about Aids, when talking about disasters. Aids seems to be the scourge of the 21st century, the great black plague of our era. Why the emergence of this sudden dreaded disease? Is it because man has gone against Nature in the last sixty years and Nature always has the last word? Is Aids the outcome of some secret genetic manipulation on monkeys for biological warfare purpose, which went wrong and spread in Africa before reaching Europe and the rest of the world ? Nobody will probably ever know the truth. World Health organisations are very fond of saying that by the year 2000, India will have the greatest reservoir of HIV contaminated cases -some even speak about 10 millions. But as every one knows, Aids spreads mainly through three: homosexuality, hypodermic syringes of drug addicts and. prostitutes. Yet homosexuality is not very common in India's villages, which comprise 80% of the population; one-sided homosexuality is a Western phenomenon and it is brought in India by westernised Indians. As for drug addiction, again it is not common in Indian villages, except in the Eastern border States, of which incidentally many happen to be Christians. Remain the prostitutes who constitute the greatest threat of spreading the disease, particularly in big cities like Bombay. Then in turn, those men who have contacted it will bring it in the villages, when they have intercourse with their wives. Let us hope that once more India's Dharma will protect her from another threat, this one so insidious and deadly that it could create havoc among its youth. ** Drugs are another deadly menace on today's humanity. The West likes to point a finger at the drug producing countries, such as Colombia or Afghanistan. But these nations are only meeting the western demand. The problem has to be tackled at the source, that is amongst the millions of drug addicts in the US and Europe. These junkies are a product and a symbol of their own failing civilisation, which is solely to blame.
http://www.nalanda.nitc.ac.in/resources/english/etext-project/history/gautier/chapter13.html
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