Saturday, April 10, 2010

India equation: Red is equal to White

My childhood was stolen from me. Wait, that's too dramatic and rather inaccurate. Now. I was driven away from my childhood. I grew up under the stress of studies. Excellence is good but achieving it is stressful. I was required to adapt continuously. And, adapt I did. From poem recitation and loud chapter reading to viva voce to Personal Interviews. From pencil to pen to keyboard. I was required to learn new things non-stop even as I never had the time to discover myself. The land mafia and city-municipality have taken away the open spaces and playing grounds from me. Note: some tribal slum dwellers also contributed to my plight by encroaching the land for a park in my colony. Industry and commerce have robbed me of my share of fresh air. Erratic urban development has led to a shortage of clean water for me and my family. Similar but yet grimmer situation leads to suicide by hundreds of students every year. Do we complain? No. But, I do have a grudge against a particular section of our society that wants a very special treatment for itself. They want to keep the natural resources to themselves. They don't want to adapt to the new situations like I did. They don't want to change, they don't want to learn. They want their daily incomes to increase in accordance with the country's increasing per capita daily income, but they don't care about their diminishing percentage share of the country's GDP. And, what's more? they even kill our precious tigers(just 1411 left!) so that they can have the land declared as wildlife-free zone and turn it to farming land. Yes, the group that I despise is the tribal people who feel that they are the only ones being robbed and everyone else's life is all milk and roses. And more than them, I despise their sympathizers. And, Mamta Banerjee also.
India is facing a lot of challenges today....like it always had. Was this not enough that now we have to also deal with and somehow appease the tribals aka Naxals? Naxals say they don't believe in parliamentary and democratic system, and it's their openly stated goal that they want to overthrow the Indian Govt. at all levels. The Naxal ideology is that democracy, judiciary, govt. etc. are all farce and they want a Mao-style communist rule in India. Well, here's a news flash- whatever form of govt. be it, communist, socialist or democratic, the ruling class can always exploit the public to some extent, remember Orwell's classification of population into classes A,B and C in his book "1984"? Well, then how's democracy superior to communism? Now, I do empathize with the tribals over how land and other resources are snatched from them for industrialization and urbanization but consider this- in China, not only the govt. officials suppress and exploit the public, they also rob them of their freedom of speech and other human rights. Just imagine, can Naxals create the same nuisance in China that they create in India? Had they done so, the Chinese govt. would have cracked down heavily on them with their army and without the international community even getting a whiff of it.
Now, let's stop this useless discussion about the form of govt. and get serious. Naxals are adept at the jungle warfare or guerrilla warfare. Now, should we, the civilized people, move back to jungle to learn the rules of fighting in a jungle? Has our modern, educated society spent its precious childhood years in studying science for nothing? Do we pay the taxes and maintain the armed forces for nothing? Nope. We have spent time, money and energy in mastering the sciences and in engineering weapons in all sizes. Let's put it to good use and show those Naxalites the advantages of getting systematically exploited in an urban setting over the sporadic exploitation in a jungle setting, and maybe they would drop their agenda and like to join us by building some new slums in our neighborhood. If they don't, let's do drop some serious bombs on them. And, by the way, hats-off to the India Air Force which despite losing its brave officers to plane crashes due to faulty planes which were purchased by the corrupt govt., still maintains a view that they are not willing to carry out lethal air-strikes against the tribals whose non-participation in the country affairs is partly responsible for the lax govt. that we are having.