[Reader-list] "We are the world's biggest Banana Republic"

[Sanjay Kak]

Strong words, from one of the TOI's staffers!
The smell has become difficult to contain, I guess
Best
Sanjay

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We are the world's biggest Banana Republic
Shobhan Saxena
23 September 2010, 07:59 PM IST
http://author.toiblogs.com/Main-Street/entry/we-are-a-banana-republic-and-it-s-going-to-the-dogs

A couple of days ago, a Scottish delegate got a shock of his life this
week when he saw a dog shitting on a bed inside a 'swanky' apartment
in the Commonwealth Games village in Delhi. The Scotsman clicked a
photo of the dog, and now the picture is part of the evidence
submitted by the Scottish delegation to the Organising Committee to
prove that the multi-million dollar village is not fit for "human
habitation". In the past few days, foreign TV crews and photographers
have been busy chasing and clicking photos of dogs – peeing and
shitting in the apartments, running on practice tracks, jumping into
swimming pools and sleeping under the police cars and other vehicles
parked at Games sites and venues. The foreigners are horrified – and
scared – by the sight of street dogs running wild at the "sanitized
areas". For them, it's a sign that India is not ready for the Games
and the infrastructure here is not "world class".

There is no doubt now that India's carefully created, and airbrushed,
image of an 'emerging superpower' and the 'second-fastest growing
economy' in the world rots in the piles of rubbish across Delhi. The
myth of 'India Shining' (BJP's slogan) and 'India Rising' (the
Congress' slogan) has been busted. We have proved to the world – and
to ourselves as well – that we are a third world banana republic which
is falling into a bottomless pit.

I am not worried about the mismanagement at the Games sites. We
shouldn't have organized the Games at all. The country which in 63
years of independence hasn't been bale to provide proper living
houses, clean drinking water, uninterrupted electricity, fulltime
jobs, healthy food, clean air and free education to all its citizens
despite spending trillions of dollars, how did you expect the same
country to pull off an international sporting event without it sinking
into the slime and grime of corruption and bad governance.

I am not justifying corruption, but it's a fact that graft is part and
parcel of capitalism, though the level differs from country to
country. This has been proved by western politicians and Wall Street
bankers in the past couple of years. In US, the bankers and financial
giants robbed the American people, mostly the middle and
working-class, clean and then declared themselves bankrupt, and they
were bailed out by the US government with public money. This was the
world's biggest daylight robbery. And no one, except Michael Moore,
raised a red flag.

In the US, this brazen act of corruption made thousands of houses go
under water and millions jobless, but in India something more sinister
and dark has happened in the garb of the Games. In the past two years,
the governments of this country and this city have launched a
full-scale war on the poor. Millions of poor people from the country's
dustbowls have been brought here to work at the Games construction
sites. They have been working day and night at the venues and living
like animals under plastic sheets, sleeping on wet ground and eating
filthy food.  That food is just about enough to keep their body and
soul together so that they can build the glass and chrome buildings
and showcase India Shining to the world.

In 21st century India, the street dogs are luckier than the poor. The
dogs make news for shitting in swanky beds and the poor workers go to
snake-infested swamps to take a leak at night, get bitten and die and
not a soul is stirred.

On one hand the government has brought these people from
poverty-ravaged villages to work on its corruption-tainted buildings,
and on the other hand lakhs of hard-working but poor people have been
thrown out of the city so that the foreigners coming here for the
Games do not see the ugly side of India. Thousands of people living in
Yamuna Pushta area were plucked from their houses and dumped on a
piece of wasteland in Haryana. Beggars were packed off earlier. Now,
the police are scanning the slums of Delhi and Gurgaon and people are
being forced to take trains back to their villages. These people have
been living and working here for years and suddenly they have been
asked to leave. The government doesn't want any filth in the city
during the Games. It's putting bamboo screens in front of the slums.

But, now the filth is out in the open. The mismanagement and
corruption has been exposed by the photos of dirty, filthy and
unhygienic apartments at the Games village. And guess who gets blamed
for it. Not the politicians or babus or contractors but the poor
workers at the site.  And when 27 workers got injured on Wednesday
when the footbridge near the JL Nehru stadium collapsed, they were
herded like animals into private vehicles and dumped at a sarkari
hospital. No ambulance for them, no post-recovery package for them.
Just Rs 50,000 in damages for broken legs, heads and spinal chords.

And, to hide the hide the accident near the Nehru stadium, the area
was cordoned off and cops in full riot gear were stationed so that
ordinary people and media and foreigners can't get anywhere near the
site of one more horrendous accident. Suddenly, the government has one
solution for every problem across the country: post heavily-armed
police and paramilitary men at the scene of a "disturbance" and give
them a license to shoot at will. It happens everyday in Srinagar. It's
happening everyday in the jungles of Chhattisgarh. It's happening in
the villages of West Bengal. It's happening in the villages of UP.
Now, with Ayodhya verdict round the corner, the temple town is being
turned into a fortress with men in khaki swarming over it.

These are the symptoms of a failed state. We make tall claims about
growth, but we treat out poor worse than animals. We aspire to be
world power, but we can't even provide drinking water to all our
citizens. We claim to be world's biggest democracy, but we 'solve' all
our social and political problems with loaded guns in hand. It's time
we accepted that we are a banana republic and we are going to the
dogs.

(end)