BH Editorial Team
Our initiative to reach out to people on the relevance of Gandhi and his thoughts in 2012 has received overwhelming responses. The editorial team will post the opinion and insightful comments on these pages. Responses have been suitably edited and paraphrased where ever required. Below is the response of Dr. Shyam Yadav from Kabul.
Dr. Shyam Yadav an advisor to the Government of Afghanistan cites Kautilya’s Arthashastra to drive home his point that “India has been a corrupt country since time immemorial”, (hope he did not mean all Indians and only the elite and the ruling class!). He further adds the character of slavery dominates India as Indians have been under foreign occupation since many centuries and that is perhaps why Dr. Yadav thinks that Indians have not protested enough against corruption and scams of the governments.
In the current scenario he feels that Indian citizens, by not participating en-masse, have failed the Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev movements against corruption and black money. To quote him “ What Middle class public, government employees, teachers, advocates, technocrats, administrators, political parties, and other public & social organizations, and local traders are working? Why these groups of society are indifferent in India? If all these can observe only two days strike or BANDH all over India these corrupt people will leave India within a week.” Though we don’t need them to leave India, they must face the court of law and surrender their illegitimate wealth.
He asserts that many advanced democracies are intolerant of massive scale corruptions and scams. Citing the example of Japanese case where there have been four Prime Ministers in three years, he questions that why Indians have tolerated a corrupt government. Even though he has not raised any point whether Gandhi and his ideas are relevant in 2012, we think what we can deduce from his main argument is that Gandhian idea of accountable governance is not there in India in 2012 and government which claims to own Gandhi’s ideals are the last to follow it.
