As the nation grapples with pressing challenges, the promise of an imminent revolution looms large, heralding a new era of change and progress.
REVOLUTION! The very word sends jitters down the spine of Indian ‘intellectuals’, these ‘heroes’ who strut about our national stage like vainglorious peacocks, and preach homilies to our gullible and largely ignorant public.
It horrifies and petrifies them, and they see looming before them the spectre of a Guillotine, which may chop off many heads. They run from it, like cockroaches running from light, or like perceiving Banquo’s ghost or Caesar’s spirit at Phillipi. But I perceive the revolution as something inevitable in India.
Everything has collapsed in India. Our state institutions have become hollow and empty shells, and our Constitution reduced to a scarecrow, whose only purpose is to deceive the Indian people that they are ruling themselves, when the truth is that we are being ruled by a bunch of crooks and hoodlums.
There is often tall talk of India having the fastest growing economy in the world, and rapid growth in GDP, but the truth is very different.
Consider the facts:
- 1. Every second child in India is malnourished, according to the reputed international agency Global Hunger Index, which says that the position is getting worse.
- 2. 57% of our women are anaemic, which means they are not getting nourishing food.
- 3. 12 million youth are entering the job market every year, but only half a million jobs are being created every year in the organised sector of our economy. What happens to the remaining 11 and a half million? They end up as hawkers, street vendors, stringers, bouncers, criminals, beggars, or suicides.
- If a single government job of peon (chaprasi) is advertised, there are often 10,000 to 20,000 applicants, many having Ph.D., M.Sc., MBA, or engineering degrees, all begging for a chaprasi’s job.
- 4. Prices of essential commodities like food, fuel, and medicines have skyrocketed in India. Isn’t it obvious that the situation has now become explosive, and we are coming closer to some kind of French or Russian Revolution, which were triggered off by bread riots in Paris and St Petersburg?
It is true that at present there is no actual revolutionary situation in India, but it will gradually and inevitably develop as things worsen.
Most of the present Indian politicians, of all parties, are a bunch of cunning, selfish, shifty, slippery, smooth-tongued rogues, rascals, gundas, criminals, scoundrels, looters, gangsters, deceivers, and mafiosi, only interested in power and pelf, and experts in polarising society by inciting caste and communal hatred to secure their vote banks.
They have no genuine love for the country or the people’s welfare but only seek power and pelf. They are shameless and incorrigible and cannot be reformed. Don’t such people deserve to be dealt with like the aristocrats in the French Revolution or the Russian Romanovs?
It is obvious that parliamentary democracy is not suited to India, as it runs largely on the basis of feudal forces like casteism and communalism, forces that must be destroyed if India is to progress, but which are further entrenched by parliamentary democracy (as it largely runs on their basis).
Our Constitution has exhausted itself, our ‘democracy’ has been hijacked by feudal-minded people who are incorrigible.
On the other hand, the socio-economic distress of our people keeps mounting. I submit that the solutions to the massive problems of India lie outside the system, not within it. No amount of reforms will do, and what is now required is a revolution.
What form this revolution will take, how much time it will take, who will be its patriotic, selfless, modern-minded leaders determined to create a political and social order under which India rapidly modernises and industrialises and our people enjoy a high standard of living and lead decent lives, cannot be predicted, but what certainly can be predicted is that it is coming.
This revolution will be arduous, protracted, and extremely difficult, with many twists and turns, and in which tremendous sacrifices will have to be made before it is ultimately successful.
At present, India is going through the period of ideological revolution, which always precedes an actual revolution, as historical experience reveals.
For example, the great French Revolution of 1789, which destroyed feudalism in France, was preceded by decades-long ideological struggle by great thinkers and writers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and the French Encyclopedists, who launched powerful attacks against the feudal system and religious bigotry.
The weapons used in the ideological revolution are not guns, bombs, or swords, but ideas.
India now beckons its Voltaires, Rousseaus, and Thomas Paines to do their patriotic duty to the country. punjab
Markandey Katju
Justice Markandey Katju is former Judge, Supreme Court of India and former Chairman, Press Council of India.
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