democracy and india.....???!!!!

Come another independence day and the crooning shall begin yet again on national media about how great a country we are and we being the largest democracy of the world. events that when studied over a period of five and a half decades shall convince several of the true nature and ugly face of the nation's state of affairs, a situation that should ideally put the politicians of the nation to shame but then when was the last time a politician was born with an iota of sense and shame.....

let us have a look at the displacement that has been taking place very quietly and with ruthless efficacy in the hinterlands of the nation. over the last 50 years some 50 million people have been displaced on account of several power projects, dams, mining most of it being illegal but then legal and illegal in my nation are identical twins...

well the problem here is that most of those displaced have been people who come under what we all know as the marginalised communities, most of them Scheduled castes and tribes. the government had no idea of what resettlement meant hence for the last 50 years there has been nothing of that sort and people have been thrown away from their homes, entire villages razed across madhya pradesh, chattisgarh and jharkhand, protestors tortured to death, women raped and cattle killed.....some development right....well that is the kind of reality that the tribals of this nation live in while urban india continues to croon in its magnificently flawed notion of being democratic...

so the resettlement stats stand at 25% only...abysmal is too nice a word for the plight of the millions who have lost all in the name of some twisted notion called development.....collateral damage people tell me but then do they understand what it means to have one's home bulldozed right in the dead of night.....visit lanjigarh in kalahandi district of orissa to know what it is like....

by the way what kind of a democratic government arrests people who do satyagraha in protest over their lands being submerged by a hydel power project which they have been opposing since day 1 ....what recourse does the ordinary citizen of this nation have over injustice....we have a supreme court whose jurisdiction is limited to the permiters of the supreme court compound in delhi....

where else in a self proclaimed democracy would one see an entire battalion of the army engaged in ethnic cleansing like the naga battalion is doing in chattisgarh....a people's army acting against its own people.....where else would one find the government arming 15, 16 year old kids with Ak 47 rifles so that they can fight maoists who are those who have decided to act against a state which stirs into action only when bombs and IED's go off...and not when women are gangraped by the salwa judum, the indian army, houses burnt, protestors hacked off....with garrotes....

democracy.....why not that's what the preamble of my failed nation cries out so loudly that it is not clear whether how long will it resist......