Besides being the end of the millennium’s first decade, 2010 was, as called by many, the Year of Kalmadi. When the Delhi Commonwealth Games chief became a euphemism for one scam being dug after another and the urban middle-class was forced to jolt out of its snooze-mode, corruption-induced ennui. As SMS forwards and Facebook statuses expressed the disgust of common folk on scamsters using crores of rupees as loose change, questions arose and fingers were pointed not surprisingly, even at the foundation of our very democracy, which celebrates 61 years today.
Skeletons coming out of the closet however, don’t always bring bad news. As Harsh Vardhan Sahni, who is studying Contemporary India for his Masters, points out. “While more scams and corruption don’t indicate progress, more of them being brought to light and being publicly discussed and debated are all signs of strengthening of a democracy. Every citizen can employ decentralised tools of checks and balances like PILs and RTI, other than giving careful thought to whom they vote for,” he suggests about greater involvement of people. He adds, “The youth can perhaps endeavour to keep themselves abreast of happenings and exercise educated discretion as activists or as an electorate.”
A rationale of ‘Despite, Still’ is supported by Nishant Jha, a recruiter and a motorcyclist. “Even with billions of dollars being bungled annually in scams, we have a growth rate of 8.5-9 per cent. So, with youth on our side, only sky is the limit if we are able to tackle the demon of corruption,” he tells us as he cautions against unfair comparisons to established ‘superpowers’ like America. “We have had some inherent disadvantages like our dastardly caste system and explosive population growth amongst many and the US is what it is today only after 234 years of its independence,” he says.
But as the radicals quickly dismiss the ‘everything goes’ mindset of the nation unfit to handle a democracy and suggest China’s iron-fisted approach as the solution, most at least think once that whether at all that could be a scam-proof solution. Stand up comic and author of the popular satire blog, Khamba’s blog, Gursimran Khamba thinks that the global debate which is pitted against China in terms of bringing the guilty to the book, focuses on only one aspect. “The freedom of speech and the fundamental rights which we so easily take for granted are a result of the democracy that we live in. And these concepts become even more relevant today, when we are faced with problems like terror, Naxalism and inflation, which we need to tackle collectively,” he says adding that the same people who are complaining haven’t proved themselves effective as a voting block or active participants in the democratic system. “Till now we have been consumers of democracy, and it’s now time we become participants of it,” he tells us.