The new Indian

Public crime is more severe and more elaborate and more devious and more hurtful than isolated murders and robberies and rapes because here an entire country is subjected to plunder – mind, body, and spirit. Millions of people are impacted. Generations destroyed.  However not even one politician / bureaucrat has been booked till date. Nobody is in jail. Nobody has been reprimanded.

How can the judiciary, activists, media, and people not have a forum or a platform to force things? Can’t we force a legislation to create fast track courts to discharge justices?

Most TV commentaries just about scratch the surface in the debates & discussions and soon another topic lands up, another priority lands up, another ‘story’ emerges and the first one is never taken to its logical conclusion. Problems dropped from the face of the public attention.  The politician and the bureaucrat know this only too very well. They know that the attention span of the society is only as small as the next ‘story’ in line.

We need a quantum change in the way we need our country to be governed.

We need powerful conversationalists, debaters who can communicate the essence of the issues to a variety of people - common man including. We need an economic analysis of the crime perpetuated. The opportunity loss has to be determined and the lost opportunities had that crime not been perpetuated must be communicated in varying degrees of comprehensiveness so that every section of our society gains understanding of what that means to us Indians.

We need to cite evidence of similar 'atrocities' from across the reasonable world and explain in lucid terms as to how they were dealt with and what measures were introduced into the system to reduce the possibility of the crime of a similar nature from being perpetuated.

We need a mechanism to debate the issues confronting the nation and it has to be particular - we want to fight the big battles and not boil the ocean fighting all the issues of the day because it does not become practical. Citizens must have the means to assess the important issues of the day, the solutions proposed, and the realism behind them.

These issues must be the planks on which future political parties must fight their battles for us citizens. We need to have a mechanism for the society at large to understand what issues are important for these political parties, why are these issues important to the local society and community, are the proposed solutions viable, what sort of barriers exist to solve these issues, what timetables are being proposed to address these issues, who are the actors that are responsible for addressing these issues, do they have the credibility, do they have the required resources, responsibility, accountability, power, and governance to work the issues, and several others along similar lines.

People should not be electing their representatives based on emotional planks. They need to understand that their future lies in their ability to elect individuals and governments who are best placed to solve their problems in the short and in the long term.

Now I understand that these are quantum changes that must be brought to our dealings but this is only possible if large audience aggregators, thought leaders, influencers, activists, industrialists, and educationists, and people like you and me all come together and start the process.

Let us elect such MPs and their leaders and therefore the right government who are best placed to:

a) Solve the people problems predictably

b) Grow our country economically and equitably

c) Define the best security apparatus for our country - internal & external

d) Understand the economics, security, & the politics of the world

e) Implement the best governance for accountability

f) Implement the best judiciary for speedy redressal

That means we need to be the new Indian ourselves. The starting point is us. Don’t settle for less.