Although in the excitement generated by the mminent assembly elections in several states and the general election scheduled for next summer, it has gone off the headlines, government corruption is — or should be — a live issue at the hustings in the states and at the Centre. Two recent incidents in Maharashtra — India’s most industrialised and second most populous (112 million) state — underline the grave dangers posed by pervasive, unchallenged corruption.

On April 4, an eight-storey residential building collapsed like a pack of cards in the township of Mumbra, a suburb of Mumbai, killing 74 people including 28 children and injuring 62. A post-mortem has revealed that the construction was wholly unauthorised, with public safety officials including municipal corporators bribed by the unqualified builders to turn a blind eye, even as every public safety norm — shallow foundation, substandard materials etc — was breached. Subsequent media investigations have revealed that 90 percent of residential buildings in Mumbra (pop. 9 lakh) are unauthorised and/or unsafe for human habitation. Preliminary data relating to Mumbai itself indicates that a large number of residential and commercial buildings in the nation’s commercial capital are also unauthorised and/or unsafe.

The second incident which has caused untold misery within India’s most industrial state, is a manmade drought — the worst  in 40 years in the Marathwada region of Maharashtra. The callous reaction of deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar to this tragedy which has prompted mass migration and over 228 farmer suicides (in the past 10 months), and to a 55-day fast undertaken by an aggrieved farmer protesting the state’s refusal to release water from the Mula dam, was to contemptuously dismiss the protest fast, and sarcastically enquire whether people should urinate into the dam to originate water. This coarse remark was made even as accusations are intensifying against the state government for diverting water for sugarcane crops and factories run by the powerful sugar cooperatives lobby dominated by mysteriously wealthy politicians. In this context it is pertinent to note that last year the office of the comptroller general and auditor had excoriated the state’s ministry of irrigation for spending over Rs.70,000 crore to build dams and create a network of water distribution canals with little to show for it by way of completed projects. It should be noted that Pawar has held the irrigation portfolio in the state government for over a decade.

In the circumstances, the paramount national interest demands that the public — especially the media and intelli-gentsia — doesn’t take its eyes off the corruption issue during the heat and noise of the run-up to the 2014 general election. In particular Anna Hazare’s Lok Pal Bill should not be allowed to fade quietly into the night, due to official neglect and public apathy. By all indications, the mainstream Congress and BJP parties are too steeped in corruption to reform and redeem. There are other political parties in the fray. It is the duty of citizens to seek them out and vote them in. The future of their children — if not their own — depends on it.  

LESSONS FROM THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MRS. THATCHER

The timely death of baroness Thatcher, more popularly known as Margaret Thatcher, former prime minister of Britain on April 8, marked the passing away of not only the longest-serving (1979-90) prime minister of  the UK in the 20th century, but also of one of its greatest. Unfortunately there is insufficient appreciation of the extent to which she transformed Britain, which had been steadily drifting towards financial and intellectual bankruptcy after World War II. 

The blight that had descended upon imperial Britain after it saved the world from the evil Nazi dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, was the confused ideology of state-driven socialism propagated by the Labour Party, which swept Britain’s first post-war general election. Labour halted the post-war economic recovery of Britain by nationalising coal, steel, civil aviation and other infrastructure industries. Moreover, given that the Labour Party was strongly supported by the trade unions, they became very powerful and over-manning, and low productivity quickly destroyed the country’s industrial base. 

A large number of India’s post-independence  leaders were educated in Britain, with the result that this retrograde socialist ideology which essentially propagates — and continues to propagate — that government clerks and risk-averse admin officials can run industrial enterprises as well as businessmen, was imported into India and the newly liberated nations of the third world. It was a deadly incubus, and it is arguable that Fabian socialism — Britain’s deadliest post-war export — set India and developing nations back by half a century in terms of economic growth and development.

After Thatcher was elected the first woman leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, she led the party to a great electoral victory in 1979. Well-versed in British history and conscious that it was the native spirit of enterprise and trade which had made Britain the greatest global power of the 18th and 19th centuries with the imperial flag following trade, she denationalised steel, rail and civil aviation among other industries and broke the power of the trade unions by mandating bilateral, productivity-linked agreements between managements and unions in industry. Citizens residing in state-provided (council) houses were enabled to purchase their accommodation through installment payments, creating a new class of property owners in class-conscious Britain. 

There’s much that the leaders of Indian political parties mired in the subsidies addicted anti-business ideology of the Labour Party, can learn from a study of the life and times of the late Margaret Thatcher. The inherently enterprising and industrious people of India aspire for equality of economic opportunities rather than the faux political equality and subsidies fed to them by the leaders of our mainstream political parties. Margaret Thatcher understood this about the British people. Post-independence India’s leaders who super-imposed inorganic Fabian socialism upon free India and stifled the native spirit of enterprise and creativity, never did. They still don’t.