Defying all predictions that it would be a nationally humiliating flop show, the 19th Commonwealth Games (CWG) concluded in a blaze of glitz, glitter and glory in New Delhi on October 14. The last-ditch effort made by the organising committee, the Delhi administration and civil society to rescue the games from ignominy and showcase the unity in diversity of a new resurgent India, came good and could well prove to be the tipping point not only for sports education in the subcontinent, but also for the seemingly lost war against brazen official corruption — a legacy of the disastrous wrong turn newly independent India took 60 years ago into the cul-de-sac of Soviet-inspired socialism.
For resurgent India’s much neglected sportspersons hitherto dismissed as the also-ran 97-pound vegetarian weaklings of international sports too, CWG 2010 marked a momentous coming of age. For the first time in the history of the century-old Commonwealth Games (originally the Empire Games), the tally of gold medals bagged by India’s athletes and sportspersons was greater than of imperial Great Britain, our erstwhile masters — surely a fantastic morale booster to the sputtering national development effort.
At another deeper level as well, CWG 2010 has proved a success inasmuch as the shenanigans leading up to the games have demonstrated that the flame of idealism and integrity which fuelled India’s uniquely engineered freedom movement over half a century ago, is still burning within large swathes of the population. Open, continuous and uninterrupted official corruption — an everyday reality for citizens of once the world’s most idealistic democracy — has been rudely interrupted by a tidal wave of outraged public opinion.
In an unprecedented campaign orchestrated by India’s extraordinarily free and fearless media — and particularly by new genre national cable television — officials of the CWG organising committee and the Delhi Development Authority who were entrusted with the task of building sports and games infrastructure for CWG 2010 have been put under a high voltage searchlight, and are being called to account for the massive budgetary overruns in organising and staging the recently concluded games. Now that the games are over, with every passing day more horror stories of crony capitalism, blatant over-invoicing and money siphoning are emerging, offering the prospect of the end of public apathy if not tolerance, of corruption.
Right thinking people within society should ensure that the strong currents which could transform into a tidal wave against official corruption don’t run awry. The standard tactic of the politico-bureaucratic nexus which is the prime beneficiary of the plethora of discretion-laden legislation invariably hurried through Parliament, is to order an enquiry by a has-been judge which continues until the issue fades from public memory. Public opinion should not tolerate this any longer. If such an enquiry is ordered it should be swift and time-bound without extensions. The accused must be expeditiously prosecuted, tried and the guilty severely punished. This time the over-hyped Indian justice system is also on trial.
Nobel Peace Prize opportunity for India
Typically, there’s been no official reaction from the government of India to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize 2010 to China’s dissident democracy champion Liu Xiabao who is currently serving an 11-year sentence in a prison somewhere inside the communist-ruled PRC (People’s Republic of China). South Block’s silence on this landmark award could be because of its habitual timorousness about angering our anti-India communist neighbour nation to the north-east, or the outcome of an overdue new strategy to confront the Chinese dragon beginning to breathe fire and brimstone in Asia Pacific, and South and South-east Asia.
One hopes it is the latter. Because the Chinese dragon — or more accurately the communist mafia which rules PRC with an iron fist and stomping jackboot — also threatens to turn the Indian Ocean into a Chinese lake. The Communist Party of China (CPC), which over the past 69 years has admittedly transformed PRC into an economic powerhouse although at excessive cost in terms of human suffering and basic freedoms, needs to be confronted by democratic India. At stake is a very important issue: whether the nations of the world’s most populous continent will adopt the coercive, autocratic PRC socio-economic or the democratic develop-ment model.
Thus far and particularly after the India-China north-east border war of 1962 in which the Indian Army suffered a humiliating rout and loss of territory in the Aksai-Chin region, India’s policy vis-à-vis China has been characterised by military preparedness and containment. This policy response to the Sino-Pakistan threat which has necessitated maintenance of a 1 million-strong army and rising defence expenditure which at Rs.145,000 crore diverts almost 3 percent of GDP annually away from investment in the vitally necessary social sector (education and health), is sub-optimal.
Therefore news that a democracy movement is extant in China offers India through its various agencies opportunity to lend aid, advice and moral and material help to Liu and the democracy movement in PRC to loosen the death-grip of the CPC on the 1.20 billion people of China. This strategy also requires improving and upgrading the quality of interaction between India and Taiwan and the democratic countries of South-east Asia including Indonesia and South Korea which are feeling the heat of the Chinese dragon, with the objective of containing the expansion and hegemony plans of the PRC’s totalitarian regime.
The award of the Nobel Peace prize to Liu Xiabao not only offers great inspiration to the pro-democracy movement in China, but also a great opportunity to India — the standard bearer of democracy in Asia — to export and disseminate the ideals of universal adult franchise and representative government, for a flowering of political freedom in mainland China. That’s the best way to contain and perhaps vanquish, the Chinese dragon.