“THANK God, he is neither a Punjabi, nor a Muslim.”

The then Defence Minister Baldev Singh told Lord Mountbatten, India’s first Governor General. They were talking about the assassin who had shot Mahatma Gandhi dead. This was on January 30. All India Radio broadcast the whole day long the killer’s identity to stall riots.

What is the lesson that India should have learnt? Has it done so after 59 years? Has India developed the way he would have liked it to be? I cannot lard the piece with instances of Gandhi’s love or infatuation because I am privy to none. This side of his life is left to his grandchildren who are at it with a vengeance.

Violence has increased and the incidents are like pimples to mar the beauty of an otherwise democratic face. That the number of violent incidents should increase is a matter of concern. What is alarming is that violence has become a mode for settling problems.

Both the state and the crop of militant growing by the day are using weapons to kill. Gandhi said: “Wrong means will not lead to right results.” That explains why he employed non-violence as an instrument to wage the freedom struggle to oust the British. If you have to cross a pool of blood to reach your destination, he would say, it is not worth doing.

Post-independence India has not given that message. It should have at least distanced itself from the nuclear arms which eptomise violence. It should have pursued disarmament with conviction and vigour. Instead, the wrong done by Mrs Indira Gandhi in exploding the bomb was recommitted by the BJP and instuitionalised by the Congress through the Indo-US nuclear deal. The Manmohan Singh government is also buying arms left, right and centre while leaving fields like education and health famished for funds.

In the realm of politics too, I do not know of any central or state government or party which has not resorted to wrong methods to gain power and then to sustain it by hook or by crook. Whether it was Mrs Gandhi who imposed the emergency to suppress her opponents or P.V. Narasimha Rao who bribed MPs to save his government or Atal Behari Vajpayee who placated his allies through dubious methods, the purpose of the three prime ministers was the same: how to stay in power. For all of them, no law was sacrosanct enough and no amount of money high enough for managing a majority in the Lok Sabha.

The present government may be a shade better but half of its ministers are corrupt. Arrogance of power of the Congress is apparent from the appointments it makes or the prizes it doles out. In fact, the whole system is reeking with favouritism and corruption.

Gandhi feared this and said four months after independence: “Today politics has become corrupt. Anybody who gets into politics gets contaminated…But in general there is so much corruption today that it frightens me.” Gandhi has not been proved wrong. Men at high places can probably stop the rot to some

extent, though not to Gandhi’s expectations. But they themselves are so much part of the system that they cannot see the wood for the trees. Gandhi could not have imagined that the nation to which he promised food, employment and shelter, would one day have development for a few at the expense of millions. Special economic zones which have driven out farmers from their fertile lands could not have been on his agenda. Grasping industrialists and speculative builders have destroyed the agricultural economy. Gandhi had talked about self-sufficiency of villages but would have been shocked to hear that on an average 10 farmers have been committing suicide every day. They could not clear their debts or save the crop from drought. Success or wealth has become important, not how you attain it. The apparatus of development is creaking and it is anybody’s guess what portion of public funds is finding its way to individual’s pockets or the party coffers. Not more than one third of funds reach the beneficiary, say official estimates. There are only a few bureaucrats who are above board. The right to information (RTI) may some day destablise the equanimity which the system of corruption has come to enjoy. But both politician and bureaucrat are finding ways to make transparency opaque. Gandhi said last person first. How can this be possible when the government’s policies are directed towards benefiting the organised sector, five per cent, in preference to the unorganised, which is 95 per cent? It is the first person who is getting fatter and fatter and the last one leaner and leaner, earning less than $2 a day. The industry is becoming capital intensive and the avenues of employment are lessening day by day. Official figures for unemployment are 10 per cent. But it is much more and increasing rapidly.

On the other hand, the state is withdrawing from the field of social welfare. Private schools and private hospitals are unaffordable. Public hospitals and government schools are very few and overburdened. What does the common man do when there is already a long queue ahead of him? Twenty million children have no school to go.

Gandhi’s country has much of which it should be ashamed about _ poverty, disease and crime. Still more disconcerting is lack of sensitivity. Civil society does not want to even hear the word poverty. Their world of malls and plazas, built even at the expense of environment, is socked with foreign brands and eating places. The number of those who frequent them may not be more than 250 million which is only one-fifth of India’s population. But they control everything, politics, economics, government and even the media. They would not know or recall that Gandhi died at the hands of a Hindu who represented fundamentalism which the Mahatma thought his country would not uphold. India is still grappling with the onslaughts on its secular ethos. One editor rightly observed after the demolition of the Babri masjid that Gandhi was shot on January 30, but he died on December 6 when the masjid was destroyed. Gandhi was re-assassinated at his home state, Gujarat, where its chief minister Narendra Modi saw to the killing of hundreds of Muslims and the uprooting of thousands of them from their homes in villages and cities. The problem the nation faces today is that there is none expect Gandhi who evokes respect. People can relate to him while discussing the future. Unfortunately, his values have been lost in the Incredible India where the survival is that of the fittest and where the poor are increasingly pushed to the wall.