Indian democracy's true power are its people, not leaders

A few days ago I was speaking at a literary festival - Dehradun's very first - and the discussion turned to the political troubles of our times. These things can become fairly grim. The police horse, Shaktiman, had just died - possibly exemplifying how terribly brutal and vicious our politics and politicians have become, and I guess people were not in very good cheer.

I intervened to suggest that things were not as bleak as we might see them to be.

Among the audience were a number of schoolchildren and it was primarily to them that I made this address. We had survived the Emergency (when I was an infant), the 1984 riots (when I was a young child), and the massacres - Nellie, Bhagalpur, Hashimpura, Gawkadal, Bombay, and numerous others as the '80s turned to the '90s, and I left school to join college.

At one level, looking back at the decades of my life, it seems they have all been marked by the blood of innocents shed for those in lust for political power, setting Indians against Indians, until all of us seem stained by the crimes inflicted on each other.

And yet, we have survived. Not only have we survived, but unlike the past crimes, some of those guilty of recent murders have even been punished. In the face of these massive injustices, that seems little, but change is slow and we should not forget the progress we have made in light of all that we have not achieved.

I ended by saying that our hope lies in each other. And I want to emphasise that. Looking at the government we have is not a cause for hope. We have the most illiterate Cabinet in the history of India. Our minister for water resources has more criminal cases against her - including of murder of her own party members - than years in an institution of higher learning.

Job growth has slowed, while at the same time a culture of abuse and violence is either condoned, or ignored, by those in power. So much so that in the heart of Delhi, thugs led by an elected member of the legislative assembly, can attack students and media persons, one day after another in the court of law as the police watches.

Our Opposition is scarcely better.

Two years after losing power the Congress party is still - credibly - being accused of corruption charges. The most able politician in the Opposition is probably Lalu Prasad Yadav, banned from electoral politics because of his criminal conviction.

Even the new heroes, people like Richa Singh, the first woman to head the Allahabad University's students' union after Independence, have sunk to new lows, such as joining the Samajwadi Party, a political party that has covered itself with shame for the criminality of the conduct of its members and leaders. Kanhaiya Kumar's meeting with Lalu Prasad Yadav hardly augurs well.

In the meanwhile our government is giving guided tours to the ISI to our military bases, and being treated with contempt by China and the United States. We have a prime minister who cannot remember if he was married or not, or educated or not, and a minister of state for external affairs best known for forgetting his birthday. It seems our political class is dominated by clowns, or criminals, or criminal clowns.

And yet, sitting that day in Dehradun, I would still say that things are not that bad. I say this because the tragedies that we outrage about were ones we ignored not so long ago. I was, like many, broken-hearted by Rohith Vemula's suicide. But he is not the first Dalit to be so harassed, and yet, today his name is one this whole country knows. He could not reach the stars of his dreams, but he is a fallen star to us, who must take up the challenge to make sure his name - and his struggles - are not forgotten.

The harassment of women is nothing new to this country, and yet that has not stopped the women of this country from achieving greatness in industry, in the media, in the sciences, in sports, and inevery single field that they have breached. Sitting before an audience, many of them very young, I could not but say, "Look, you are our future, and you look better than we do."

Later, a journalist came to rebuke me, to tell me that I should not have spoken so blithely of the good things, and by emphasising the hope I had obscured the difficulties that we were living through, the problems with our politics. This view, I think, is mistaken. It is mistaken primarily because it views hope and despair through the prism of our politicians. Our politicians will always disappoint us.

In a democracy the hope rests not in our rulers, but in ourselves. This is the hope that drives young men and women to win greatness, to hold the powerful to account, to challenge the people that were before unchallengeable.

Hope is the kernel of revolution, without it we can change nothing. And that hope, in India today, rests with its people. As prosperity has grown, as literacy has grown, as we have become less dependent on the government, we have been able to assert our freedoms. The struggle for women's rights, for gay rights, for the respect of the marginalised arises from people who have been empowered - often by themselves, often against the interest of the ruling class.

Yes, we can and should lament at how our politicians disappoint us, but look at our people, compare how poor and disenfranchised they were at our Independence, look at them now - is any one of them a lesser person than the Englishmen who ruled them not so long ago? This is the promise of the republic, this is the hope we cannot give up.

Look away from the people who walk in the corridors of power, look instead at the people who are the real power of this country - its citizens.

Granted they may not be as lovely as you would dream, nor as well-mannered, or even as well-educated, but they grow, they strengthen, and like the gentle plants that will eat up buildings over the years, watch how they bloom, and break through the ossified traditions of class, caste and gender towards their freedom.