Inevitable versus invited

 

Freedom at Midnight is an old book. This video shared herein below is relatively an old video, too, which was shot a couple of months before the start of the lockdown.

Is there any similarity between them?

The book says that being unable to control the chaos partition left India in, the then leadership wanted Britain to take the control of the country back, in essence, invalidating the just gained independence the country.  

Our leaders at that time thought they didn’t possess the requisite administrative acumen to bring the terrible situation that ensued partition, under control. 

The book argues credibly that the art of administration always differed from taking out processions, demanding independence, raising quit-India slogan etc. That, also, the oratorial mastery or nationalistic fervour is no substitution for the management acumen either. In their place, skills to govern comes of a substantial understanding of the machinery of governance, its complexities, nuances etc. and that evolves over decades or even centuries. 

I am not drawing an unjustifiable parallel between the lack of expertise (if the case was so as claimed by the book) of the post-independence leadership and the escapist strategies of the current dispensation or to compare two totally uncomparable situations,  but to emphasise on how important it is for leaders to imbibe the spirit and culture of administration in the right direction; how important it is for them to realise that the mandate of the people is to take the country forward.

The point here is also not the historicity of the book per se. It is about the vital issues it brings to the fore for anyone to see out. That the experience and expertise required to run a humongous mechanism of administration in a country as far and wide as India in its diversity; the leadership skills required to run such a huge apparatus which will take care of the heterogeneity of the country; the ability of the leadership in getting across people with equal ease, spirit, etc.  

While it was quite natural for the fresh batch of Indian leaders to have found themselves bewildered before an invading sea of issues that they never tackled before,  the current situation is almost an invited tragedy for the ineptitude of the upstarts in the helm of affairs.  The gaucheness now is such that the country has been pushed into recession for the first time in history.

Thus the seeming similarity between the situations is only in their outward appearance, not in the circumstances or the background. While any sensible person would excuse the former one as unavoidable, he/she would certainly despise the present situation as a deliberately invited one.     

In short, the art of administration is not the empty rhetoric a leader delivers from a podium before millions of illiterates. It is not the imagination of some imbeciles without bases for materialising them on the ground.

It is also not about kindling the hopes of the downtrodden and oppressed and then take them for a ride after they have favoured you in an election.  It is also not about diverting the attention of the people from vital questions fundamental to their life, infusing a false sense of nationalism. 

In India, more than anything else, it should be about realising the facts that made possible the existence of a country that may have more diversities than that of the entire world put together. It should be about diverse aspirations deciding to be one to evolve to a dream that will set in to form a common identity on its own terms. It should be about different dialects converging to shape up a new tongue that has everyone’s vocabulary in it.

PS: a new video shot post-lockdown can only narrate a worsened version of the story.

 

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