Indian establishment’s Stockholm syndrome

Despite being proven beyond all reasonable doubt that India’s 18-million strong neta-babu (politician-bureaucrat) kleptocracy is engaged in open, continuous and uninterrupted loot of the public exchequer and actual and potential revenue of governments at the Centre and in the states, there’s a curious reluctance among media pundits and the nation’s intelligentsia to encourage the entry of anti-graft crusader Anna Hazare and Team Anna into the political arena. The most common refrain is that Team Anna is a single issue movement which lacks the capability to manage the complexities of Indian politics. Such advice is indicative of the extent to which the intelligentsia is cut off from the public, groaning under the heavy burden of institutionalised corruption. Since unchecked graft in government cuts across every sector and segment of Indian society, by definition it is a multi-sector issue. The rotting grain mountains of the Food Corporation of India are the fallout of widespread theft and defalcations within the organisation, which has prevented construction of adequate storage facilities; the country’s ubiquitous urban and rural slums are the outcome of  pernicious corruption in the real estate sector; mass illiteracy and unemployability of millions of youth is the result of chronic corruption in education, and poor health and nutrition of the general populace is also the natural consequence of rampant corruption in the public healthcare system. Thus far from being a single issue, corruption is an all encompassing phenomenon which has created roadblocks in every sector of the Indian economy. Therefore if the powerful Lok Ayukta with its own police and investigation machinery and control over the CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation) — proposed by Team Anna — succeeds in putting the fear of God into every politician and bureaucrat, the nation’s GDP will automatically hit 9 percent plus per year. There is undoubtedly an element of the Stockholm syndrome in the negativism with which the intelligentsia and establishment greet any new initiative to break the stranglehold of established political parties over the polity and political process. This is because despite the political and administrative systems having been thoroughly compromised to the point of degeneration into open banditry, leading lights of the establishment have carved out comfortable niches and perches for themselves. Indeed, there is ample evidence to support the proposition that post-independence India’s national development effort has been restricted to advancement of the establishment and middle class, to the utter neglect and exclusion of the subaltern population in the lower reaches of the country’s socio-economic pyramid. The prospect of a politicised Team Anna’s single issue anti-corruption drive whose natural outcome will be root and branch reform of politics and administration to the benefit of the subaltern classes, upon whom the weight of institutionalised corruption bears most heavily, is subliminally unwelcome within the intelligentsia which prefers to bear the ills we have than fly to others they know not. Lessons from the London Olympics disaster Just one sportsperson, US swimmer Michael Phelps, has won almost as many Olympic medals — 22, including 18 gold…