India wastes freedom

“Now, you may kiss the bride,” says the Holy man, and you are free. Free to kiss the woman whom you have always wanted to kiss. That kiss, in all likelihood, is not your first. But till then you needed to find a place where nobody can see you kissing. After that announcement, you have been granted freedom to kiss in front of everybody.
When a non-Christian gets married, the licence to kiss is not handed to him/her in as many words, but the purpose of the elaborate ritual is, indeed, to grant the couple the freedom to kiss, hug etc etc. But that freedom comes at a price. In other words, it comes with a new bondage (in the language of cynics), which means:
a) You cannot, henceforth, kiss any person you want to. You can only kiss your spouse.
b) You have to look after your spouse and the child that is born out of the marriage.
c) You cannot think only about your own interests while taking a decision. You have to take your spouse’s opinion.
If you don’t obey any of the above written or unwritten rules, the joy of a marriage will be lost. First, the kissing and hugging and so on will lose their charms, and a few months or years from then, either or both of you will go to court, asking for cancellation of the freedom to kiss each other.
Cynics call it bondage, level-headed people call it responsibility. The fact remains, to have some kind of freedom, you have to give up some other kind of freedom. So when we, the Indians, drove the Queen’s men out of our country, we took up a huge responsibility. That, it seems, did not dawn on our leaders. Somehow they were under the impression that everything will fall into place, no effort is needed. Given our history of propagating fatalist philosophies, you can hardly fault them.
So even before the country was free, our leaders started fighting over who will get how much share of the power. When they could not find a clear winner or come to a consensus, they decided to cut the country into halves and distribute it among themselves. The father of the nation, who was famous for going on a hunger strike whenever the country didn’t listen to him, had perhaps lost his appetite by then and thought: “No point going on a hunger strike, I’m not eating much anyway!” Rest is shameful history.
We were given partitioned freedom. What a freedom! One fine morning, some Bengalis (and Punjabis) were told: “You are free but this land you are standing on is not your country. So pack up fast and go over to that side of the border. That’s your country.”
There they were, men who had a home and enough to maintain their families when they were not free, and penniless with no place to live after becoming free. They crossed the border on foot with families in tow. The 10-year-old sons died on the way because a doctor could not be found when the fever went out of control, the teen-aged daughters were snatched away, and then, on the platforms of Sealdah station and other refugee camps, they had to stay up all night so that the same doesn’t happen to their wives. This is real freedom, isn’t it? Everybody is free to do whatever he likes!
Hail the human spirit! People changed the times, people found homes, rebuilt their lives. Sixty-three years passed but the leaders have not changed. They are still concerned about power. The corrupt ones use it to become richer and the honest ones are not competent enough to do anything good.
And nobody accepts responsibility.
Case I: A multi-national company comes to the country, makes an unsafe plant, gas leaks, thousands are dead. The chief comes to the country, and is escorted out instead of being arrested. Decades later, the then chief minister of the state, after being found out, takes the easiest way out, saying the then union home minister, who is now dead, had pressurised him. “The then Prime Minister was innocent,” he adds. Of course. In that case the home minister was working on his own. That means the PM was an incompetent fool, couldn’t even control his own cabinet.
Case II: The country is organising a big sporting event. The organising committee’s corruption is exposed and the government avoids the responsibility of organisation. The head of the committee is a leader of the ruling party but neither the top leader of his party nor the PM, who is supposed to be a top-to-bottom honest man, asks that crook to resign. Moreover, the sports minister tells MPs they should file RTI applications if they want to know the truth about the scam.
Case III: Maoists are killing innocent people by damaging rail tracks. The railway minister says they have not done it. She even says military operations against them should stop. Not only that, she says the Maoist leader who has been killed by the joint forces was “murdered”, as if those who died in the train accident were not murdered. All this she does without being even verbally reprimanded by the PM. How can he do that? After all, she is an important ally.
It’s a free country, free-for-all. Nobody has any responsibility. We, the people of India, only have vulnerability.