Gross National Disaster

After many months of travelling across rural India, I have had the opportunity last week to sit down in Mumbai and read the papers. I find many things that are disturbing. I see trends which people had foreseen, and yet they are happening, and that is even more disturbing. This is not about things that happen to 'other people', they concern us, our society, our nation, our earth; they portend the future. It will be worthwhile to see them.

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I gather that the newspapers have now found out that the economy is in trouble, that the financial system is in a mess:

- Foreign exchange reserves at 285 billion dollars, just enough to cover seven months' imports.

- Rupee crashing vis-a-vis the dollar.

- Current Account Deficit (net outflow of foreign exchange) now at 4.8 per cent (of GDP), which is alarming, says RBI.

- Non-stop inflation over the last 18 months, food commodities hit all-time high.

I remember that in 1991, I saw very similar headlines. This is like an action replay, except that things are much worse now, because in the interim period, the nation's economic integrity has been compromised with structural changes, and large parts of the country have been mortgaged.

I also remember that the central characters of 1991 are the same as today: Manmohan Singh, P. Chidambaram and Montek Ahluwalia. It is my view that if any one group has to bear the larger blame for the nation's economic disaster and deep-rooted financial rot, it is this threesome of PM, FM and Chairman of Planning Commission . They have wilfully ignored the Indian reality and have instead bowed to the dictates of the World Bank and the IMF. Since this threesome also does salaam to Sonia, and she is the one with the 'remote control', I suppose she is also answerable for this Gross National Disaster.

Here is another set of headlines that I see:

The dependence inside Independence

Both India and the United States of America (USA) have been colonies of the English, and both claim that they are now independent. That their people are independent. Among these, the US is the senior 'independent' state, India is the junior one, and is imitating the senior in all its shades of modern democracy. So it is worthwhile to look at what we are following, to have a clear picture of what this path is leading us to.
This imitation of the US rests upon English systems that we have already copied and laid as the political foundation - a collection of 550 people in Delhi's Lok Sabha and about 4000 in the Vidhan Sabhas of different states who will 'govern' the remaining 100 crore people (1 billion people). Come to think of it, if there was one ruler, say a king, then we would say, unhappily, that we were ruled by just 0.0000001 per cent of the population. In the modern democratic system, the math does not change much, we are now ruled by a mere 0.00045 per cent of the population. But, you may say, 'we' get to choose or elect the 0.00045 per cent of people. Yes, of course, sort of; let us have a closer look at this.
It has been recorded that during the recent Presidential and Congressional elections in the USA, nearly six billion dollars was spent on behalf of candidates¹, i.e., 6 followed by nine zeros. In Indian terms, converting to rupees, that is over 30,000 crore rupees, which in numeral form is Rs 30,00,00,00,00,000, i.e., 3 followed by twelve zeros! This is an absurd number to ordinary folk, because it stuns the imagination.