People politics

This cartoon that appeared in The Asian Age makes a telling impact on the politicians in India today.

For long, we have seen politicians taking advantage of anything and everything that happens with or without their knowledge within or outside their jurisdiction. And this is the reason why Manmohan Singh said this in his Oxford address:

“The economics we learnt at Oxford in the 1950s was also marked by optimism about the economic prospects for the post-War and post-colonial world. But in the 1960s and 1970s, much of the focus of development economics shifted to concerns about the limits to growth. There was considerable doubt about the benefits of international trade for developing countries. I must confess that when I returned home to India, I was struck by the deep distrust of the world displayed by many of my countrymen. We were influenced by the legacy of our immediate past. Not just by the perceived negative consequences of British imperial rule, but also by the sense that we were left out in the cold by the Cold War.
There is no doubt that our grievance against the British Empire had a sound basis. As the painstaking statistical work of the Cambridge historian Angus Maddison has shown, India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6 percent in the year 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3 percent at that time, to as low as 3.8 percent in 1952.
Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th Century, "the brightest jewel in the British Crown" was the poorest country in the world in terms of per capita income. However, what is significant about the Indo-British relationship is the fact that despite the economic impact of colonial rule, the relationship between individual Indians and Britons, even at the time of our Independence, was relaxed and, I may even say, benign.”

We cannot forget the fact that development stopped almost completely as the British left India. In the last half a century, our politicians could never achieve what the colonial masters did. So they found out a short cut of changing the names of monuments built by the British.
If at all we measure the development by the number of fancy cars zooming around, by the television channels that have sprung up or by the trends that has changed for ever, it is the mistake in the eyes of the beholder.
We still continue to build temples, madarsas and Churches whereas we should have built faith, harmony and unity. So we have not moved a single step from where Jinnah once separated this country (or at least this is what some sections believe). We are still in that era and that is the reason the above toon is apt.

© Binu Alex