When Nations Die: Signs of a Culture in Crisis

By Frank Raj

Good or bad, you get some of the best views of India from outside the country, but they are not always flattering. “In India, where a river can be a goddess, a laundry and a toilet all at once, nothing is obvious. India can supply an example of any extreme, and convince you it’s the whole story.”

That’s an observation that was made by Brooke Unger, the former South Asia Bureau Chief of The Economist, currently its Germany correspondent. Unger doubted the integrity of India’s institutions, the quality of its infrastructure and its zeal for further reform.

He pointed out that, “The country’s official statistics are subject to frequent and unexpected revisions. India’s variety and vagueness conspire to frustrate anyone who tries to be objective.”

In his book, When Nations Die, author Jim Nelson Black writes about the ten warning signs of a culture in crisis – Lawlessness, loss of economic discipline, rising bureaucracy, decline of education, weakening of cultural foundations, loss of respect for tradition, rise in immorality, decay of religious belief, and devaluing of human life.

One could argue about which country fits his thesis, but the trends are clearly obvious in India. In fact unlike many other countries, in every one of those categories one can track the active or passive potential for violence in Indian society. According to news reports, 8,727 firearm licenses were issued in Punjab in the six months leading to the polls.

Do India’s political parties prepare in this manner for elections or for war? “Indians are not non-violent per se,” suggests Pavan K. Verma author of Being Indian. “The myth of ahimsa or non-violence as an intrinsic part of the Indian personality was sold by Mahatma Gandhi and conveniently bought by the nation. Disturbingly, Indians have a high tolerance for violence and the violence lurking below the surface of a supposedly non-violent India should never be underestimated,” writes Verma.

There are many horrors Indians routinely ignore. Sexual abuse in India remains widespread despite tightening of rape laws in 2013. According to the National Crimes Records Bureau, in 2016 the rape of minor girls increased by 82% compared with the previous year. Chillingly, across all rape cases, 95% of rapists were not strangers but family, friends and neighbors.

India also has the dubious record of leading the world in the murder of unwanted brides. 8,000 women die each year from bride burning, with several thousands more injured from ‘kitchen fires’ that are most likely intentional. Bride burning refers to situations where a wife is doused in kerosene, or any flammable liquid, and set on fire. Women rarely survive, and those that do are severely and permanently scarred.

This unimaginable, extremely violent act is performed by the husband or his family, simply because the bride’s family has refused to pay an additional dowry. Bride burning, also known as a dowry death, primarily occurs in India and Pakistan.

India historically touts itself as a secular country, where all religions are recognized and can peacefully co-exist – in theory that is commendable. Unfortunately, the reality is very different. A 2017 a Pew Research Center study of 198 countries ranked India as fourth worst in the world for religious intolerance. In a country of 1.3 billion, the incidence of religious hostility trails only Syria, Nigeria and Iraq, all places where sectarian violence is widespread.

India is not alone in seeing more religious unrest. Globally, Pew says, government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion increased in 2015 for the first time in three years. India’s constitution provides for religious freedom, but the country does not always practice it. Overall, the Pew study criticizes India for having “high” levels of government restrictions on religion, defined as interference in religion practice or proselytizing, hostility to minority religions and inaction on complaints of discrimination.

Violence in schools and colleges is another example. The death of Amann Kachroo in 2009, a 19 year-old medical student who was brutally beaten by his drunken seniors while ragging him in Kangra, Himachal Pradesh, shocked cozy middle class Indians. But the psychopathic practice has been allowed for decades in India’s institutions of learning. Even after the death was reported campus administrators tried to pass off Amann’s death as a suicide. His killers, Ajay Verma, Naveen Verma, Abhinav Verma and Mukul Sharma were convicted and sentenced to a mere four years rigorous imprisonment. The murderers were freed in 2012 after the Himachal Pradesh government decided to write off their remaining sentence on account of their \\\’good conduct\\\’ and allow them to complete their medical course at a medical college in Kangra, only barring them from government jobs.

India is also home to the largest number of malnourished children in the world. Over the decade (2005-15), there has been an overall reduction in the infant mortality rate and under-five mortality rate in India, yet the country is housing about 50 per cent of undernourished children of the world,” according to a joint study by Assocham – EY. The report found that towards the end of 2015, 40% of the Indian children were undernourished. Paradoxically, India is ranked as the third most obese nation in the world after the US and China and also the diabetes capital of the world, with about 69.2 million diabetics as per the 2015 data by World Health Organization.

With the 2019 Lok Sabha elections around the corner let’s review what goes on. India’s 2014 electoral saga was conducted in seven phases over five weeks, employing 6.5m officials. In 543 constituencies, 8,251 candidates represented 464 political parties. According to the Election Commission of India, 814.5 million people were eligible to vote, with an increase of 100 million voters since the last general election in 2009, making it the largest-ever election in the world.

Around 23.1 million or 2.7% of the total eligible voters were aged 18–19 years. The average election turnout over all nine phases was around 66.38%, the highest ever in the history of Indian general elections. In 828,804 polling stations, 1,368,430 simple, robust and apparently tamper-proof electronic voting machines were deployed. The resilience of the process and its track record of reliability is probably the most amazing conundrum in Indian politics.

How does this fine example of ‘Honor among thieves’ stand out in a nation so corrupt as ours?

Arun Shourie in his book The Parliamentary System notes, “Today in India, two races are afoot. The first is the race between a creative society, a society that shows much energy and is surging upwards on the one hand and, on the other, the scaffolding of the State, which is being hollowed by termites…..the race between those who are making the new India…and the political class that is stoking the old India, for instance, by pumping in the poison of caste – to keep itself in business.”

Shourie reveals how 99 per cent of legislators get elected by a minority of electors, with scores elected on 15-20 per cent of the votes cast-that is, by only 7-10 per cent of the population. With 39 parties in the Lok Sabha and governments consisting of 14 party coalitions how representative is our parliamentary system?

Does the present system not induce political parties to go on splintering our people? Can the country cohere when the people are splintered? Are those in government accountable to Parliament? Or are they the government precisely because they, and those who control them, control Parliament? How much lower must governance sink before we will conclude that this system has run its course? That we must devise an alternative? What could that alternative be?

Arun Shourie posed the challenge –who will champion an alternative?

The Indian election, as The Economist clarifies, looks splendid only from a distance.

India’s political campaigns are typically dominated by personalities, money and sporadic intimidation. Many candidates appeal to narrow linguistic, caste or religious groups. And the outcome is quite predictable – India’s parliament will have more lawbreakers, with nearly a quarter of the current members having faced criminal charges including murder, rape and kidnapping.

India’s future is anybody’s guess with today’s juggernaut of regional and caste-based parties whose narrow agendas brazenly decry any concept of national interest. As per recent publication from Election Commission (13th Dec 2016 and 5 May 2017), the total number of parties registered was 1841, with 7 national, 49 state and 1785 unrecognized parties.

Rahul Gandhi and the once-dithering Congress appear more focused and hopeful. India’s opposition parties are, at least rhetorically, proclaiming a plan to forge a common anti-BJP front in 2019. Twelve months is an eternity in politics, but one possibility seems evident: the upcoming 17th Lok Sabha elections once considered a cakewalk for the BJP, is turning into a unpredictable contest for 2019.

Does India’s apathy for social and political change point to serious flaws in its education system? Or does it reveal a seriously defective national character that desperately needs overhaul? With television, now reaching three-quarters of India’s urban population and a third of rural dwellers making any difference?

Sociologist Kirk Johnson confirms television is making the poor more assertive and encouraging people to mingle more across caste, age and sex. Television seems to galvanize people to act, and its impact on the 2019 elections will be interesting to see. India went from having just one television channel in 1992 to more than 883 by 2017.

The media cannot bring transformation on its own; Indians have to change and work to create the future they want. “It’s senseless to speak of optimism or pessimism,” writes Danilo Dolci, the great Italian pacifist who challenged the Mafia in Sicily. “If one works well among men, they will grow-that’s reality. The rest is smoke. It’s important to know that words don’t move mountains. Work, exacting work moves mountains.”

Work, and a change of heart. If anybody has ears to listen, let him listen.

Frank Raj is the founding editor of Desh Aur Diaspora.