Woman Power
TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan wrote recently in Business Standard: “The general pattern that emerges is that although India does not lack agencies to ensure good governance, they are mostly cosmetic in nature because, just as it was when the British ruled India, the bureaucracy is the real repository of all power. It protects itself fiercely in every manner possible. This includes negating all other agencies that exist to ensure good governance…Even after 75 years, politically, India remains feudal, and bureaucratically it remains colonial. All the good intentions exhibited by different agencies and leaders have been unable to alter both attitudes and practice. Much of India’s institutional arrangement is for show only. The only consolation the country has is that things are not worse.”
Can we seriously expect our politicians and political parties who are responsible for creating India’s anti-prosperity machine which denies Indians freedom to change overnight? Every Indian leader in power had an opportunity to undo the past; no Prime Minister did. They all stuck with the same bureaucratic minds, the same failed ideas of the past, and had the same lust for permanent power.
India needs a mass movement that replaces the politicians and political parties with new leaders who come to power with a single focus: free the people from the clutches of the government. Change can only be done via the electoral process. The good news is that two-thirds of Indian voters are what I have called NANVs (non-aligned and non-voters). They need to come together into a coalition – United Voters of India (UVI). As I have written previously, “UVI should be a decentralised platform where Independents chosen by local voters via primaries should be contestants – and presuming they win, we would have a Lok Sabha of Independents, uncontaminated by present day politicians and their parties…It is UVI which must complete the unfinished freedom movement to do what should have happened in 1947 – a political and economic revolution that put Indians on an irreversible path of prosperity.”
As Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is reported to have famously asked after a leading consulting firm presented him with a plan for 10% growth in India, “Lekin yeh karega kaun?”, we need to ask the same question: “But who will do this?”
I answered this question in a recent essay: “She will Transform India”. India needs 543 Lakshmis – educated women with no past political affiliations, with age on their side to carry the aspirations of young India. India needs an all-women Swatantra Lok Sabha, “[f]ree from the clutches of the politicians and their parties, India’s biggest enemies. Because by preventing wealth creation, they weakened our borders. Because by preventing prosperity, they created generation after generation that was enslaved by the state. By restricting [our] freedom, they gave themselves the power to extract and exploit. It is time for change, a Nayi Disha. For [us] and for India.”
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