INDIA:  A  nation  of  corruption,  prejudice  and  indifference

Despite the title of this piece, India does have brilliant people in it and many of the people of that nation are decent but for the most part, the governments and authorities in India are corrupt and the vast majority of its people have no feelings of empathy for their fellow citizens. In my opinion, India is one of the most backward nations in the world. I would be less than honest however if I didn`t mention that there are other countries in the world that are just as bad and some are even worse.

Corruption

Corruption in India is a major problem facing the people of that nation and it adversely affects its economy. A 2005 study conducted by Transparency International in India found that more than 62% of Indians had first-hand experience of paying bribes or influence peddling to get jobs done in public offices successfully. In its 2008 study, Transparency International reported about 40% of Indians had first-hand experience of paying bribes or using a contact to get a job done in public office. I don`t know what the current status is. Hopefully the figures are less. In 2012 India has ranked 94th out of 176 countries in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, which was tied with Benin Colombia, Djibouti, Greece, Moldova, Mongolia, and Senegal

Most of the largest sources of corruption in India are entitlement programs and social spending schemes enacted by the Indian government. Other daily sources of corruption include India's trucking industry which is forced to pay billions in bribes annually to numerous regulatory and police stops on its interstate highways. The causes of corruption in India include excessive regulations, complicated taxes and licensing systems, numerous government departments each with opaque and dishonest forms of bureaucracy and discretionary powers, monopoly by government controlled institutions on certain goods and services delivery, and the lack of transparent laws and processes. Corruption amongst the police is rampant in India.

The former chief vigilance commissioner Pratyush Sinha in November of last year said at a talk organized by the Federation of AP Chambers of Commerce and Industry that corruption is socially acceptable in India and millions of Indian families bribe public servants for access to basic services. He added, ``There was at least some social stigma attached to it. That is gone. So, there is greater social acceptance now for the corruption.

Santosh Hegde, a former Supreme Court justice who recently led a sweeping investigation of a mining scandal in southern India said, “Today in India, politicians are so powerful. All together, they are looting the country.” Coalgate, as the scandal is now referred to in India, is centered on the opaque government allotment process that enabled well-connected businessmen and politicians to obtain rights to undeveloped coal fields. 

Even as the scandal has renewed public anger about rising official graft and the state of the economy, Coalgate has provided fresh ammunition for those who say many of India’s politicians have become so corruptible and ineffective that they are no longer able or willing to address the country’s entrenched problems.

A decade ago, India’s leaders announced an idealistic slogan—Power for All in 2012—and they pledged to bring electricity to every corner of the country, partly by expanding coal-fired power plants. India still has more than 300 million people living without electricity, and last summer, it suffered the biggest power blackout in history. The scandal in the coal industry, meanwhile, has made it even harder for the country to generate enough electricity to meet its needs. Not being able to produce enough power has absolutely been the single biggest bottleneck for economic growth in India. A study last year that looked into contributions to India’s political parties offered a telling insight into the nexus between politics and bribes. Companies in technology and other service businesses—industries that require few government licenses or permissions, contributed almost nothing. They didn’t need to. The biggest donors on the other hand were involved in mining, electrical power and other sectors dependent on the government to obtain rights to natural resources, hence, the graft amongst India’s politicians.

The newly elected coalition national government, led by the Indian National Congress Party, vowed to open up the power sector, which immediately prompted a rush of applicants for India’s captive coal fields. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, chose instead not to introduce competitive bidding, thereby leading to a murky allocation process. A government screening committee chose the recipients; several former and current bureaucrats and industry officials say its decisions were highly subjective, often favouring applicants with close ties to state and national political bosses.                                                                                             

Corruption in the Indian society has been around from time immemorial in one form or the other. The basic commencement of corruption started with India’s opportunistic leaders who have already done greater damage to India’s economy. People who work on the premise of right principles are generally unrecognized and considered to be foolish in India’s modern society. Corruption in India is the direct result of the connection between bureaucrats, politicians and criminals. Earlier, bribes were paid for getting wrong things done, but now bribes are paid for getting right things done within the right time. Further, corruption has now becoming recognized by many people in India as being respectable because respectable people are indulging in it. Social corruption includes less weighing of products, adulteration in edible items, and bribery of various kinds that incessantly continues to prevail in Indian society.

There is only one way to stop corruption in India. Sentence those who are involved in corruptions to lengthy imprisonment and take their property and their money from them so that when they are finally released from prison, they are penniless. Some will say that is unfair to their families. As far as I am concerned, their families benefited from the corruption and they too must suffer from the actions of those that participated in the corruption.

Prejudice

In India, the caste system is a system of division of labour and power in human society. It is a system of social stratification. The caste system is commonly thought of as an ancient fact of Hindu life, but various contemporary scholars have argued that the caste system was constructed by the British colonial regime.        

The Indian government officially recognizes historically discriminated lowest castes of India such as Untouchables and Shudras.  The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes are two groupings of historically disadvantaged people that are given express recognition in the Constitution of India. During the period of British rule in the Indian sub-continent they were known as the Depressed Classes. The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes make up around 15% and 7.5% respectively of the population of India, or around 24% altogether, according to the 2001 Census. The proportion of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the country's population has steadily risen since independence in 1947. Since Independence, the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and other backward classes (all three categories combined together) now constitute about 60 percent of India's population.                                                                                                                           

Despite the enormous handicap these people face, a great many of them have risen above their status and accomplished great deeds in India and elsewhere. 

 More than 160 million people in India are considered as Untouchables—people tainted by their birth into a caste system that deems them impure, less than human. They are at the bottom of the caste system.                                                             

Human rights abuses against these people, known as Dalits, are legion. A random sampling of headlines in mainstream Indian newspapers tells their story: “Dalit boy beaten to death for plucking flowers”; “Dalit tortured by cops for three days”;  “Dalit 'witch' paraded naked in Bihar”; “Dalit killed in lock-up at Kurnool”; “7 Dalits burnt alive in caste clash”; “5 Dalits lynched in Haryana”; “Dalit woman gang-raped, paraded naked”; “Police egged on mob to lynch Dalits”. These are just a few of the many abuses that the Dalits are subjected to.                                                              

Dalits are not allowed to drink from the same wells, attend the same temples, wear shoes in the presence of an upper caste, or drink from the same cups in tea stalls. The Americans shouldn`t look so smug. They subjected the Blacks to similar kinds of abuse in the past. I remember when Jews and Blacks were not accepted in finest hotels in the US. Even Jews weren`t accepted in many hotels in Canada, even the nondescript hotels so we in Canada should also not look too smug.                                         

India's Untouchables are given the lowest jobs and they live in constant fear of being publicly humiliated, paraded naked, beaten, and raped with impunity by upper-caste Hindus seeking to keep them in their place. Merely walking through an upper-caste neighborhood is a life-threatening offense for any Dalit willing to take the risk.                                                                                                                    

Every hour, two Dalits are assaulted; every day three Dalit women are raped, two Dalits are murdered, and two Dalit homes are torched. No one believes these numbers are anywhere close to the reality of crimes committed against Dalits. Because the police, village councils, and government officials often support the caste system, which is based on the religious teachings of Hinduism, many crimes go unreported due to fear of reprisal, intimidation by police, inability to pay bribes demanded by police, or simply the knowledge that the police will do nothing.

Despite the fact that untouchability was officially banned when India adopted its constitution in 1950, discrimination against Dalits remained so pervasive that in 1989 the government passed legislation known as The Prevention of Atrocities Act. The act specifically made it illegal to parade people naked through the streets, force them to eat feces, take away their land, foul their water, interfere with their right to vote, and burn down their homes. Unfortunately, not much had changed.

In 2000, as many as 68,160 complaints were filed against the police for activities ranging from murder, torture, and collusion in acts of atrocity, to refusal to file a complaint. Sixty two percent of the cases were dismissed as unsubstantiated and only 26 police officers were convicted in court.

Enforcement of laws designed to protect Dalits is so lax,  it is almost non-existent in many regions of India. The practice of untouchability is strongest in rural areas, where 80 percent of the country's population resides.                                                                    

It is in those regions that the underlying religious principles of Hinduism dominate. Hindus believe a person is born into one of four castes based on karma and purity—how he or she lived their past lives. Those born as Brahmans are priests and teachers; Kshatriyas are rulers and soldiers; Vaisyas are merchants and traders; and Sudras are laborers. Within the four castes, there are thousands of sub-castes, defined by profession, region, dialect, and other factors. Untouchables on the other hand are literally outcastes because according to Hindus, the Untouchables are a fifth group that is so unworthy to Hindus; because it doesn't fall within the caste system they recognize.

Indifference to the females of India                                                                          

The attitudes of men towards the females in India are outrageous. It makes you want to shun the males of that country. The first rule that young boys are taught by their horrible fathers in this deeply flawed patriarchal society is that men rule the roost. To fathers, getting a first-born son is like striking gold. And in most cases, that child and any boys that follow are spoiled to an extreme degree. Their needs are met even if that means casting a blind eye to what is considered decent in any other society. Young girls, if they aren’t aborted first, have to do without. Most fathers consider them simply as an unfortunate result of an unwanted accident of birth. 

Afsun Quareshi in England wrote about a typical incident that happens in India. A few years back, a young Canadian girl out of her teens endured the ordeal of an arranged marriage to a stranger in India. Although Canadian-born, she was sent to live with her in-laws in a small Indian town. India having the kind of society it is saddled with—various members of her new extended family, i.e., brothers, sisters, grandparents, uncles, etc., lived communally under one roof. Within weeks of her arriving, a brother-in-law attempted to rape her. The attitude of the rest of the family was, “Get over it. Boys will be boys.” She persisted in her complaint and her persistence resulted in her being divorced which ironically was instigated from the groom’s family, who never denied the brother-in-law’s crime, but felt dishonoured by the fact that this Canadian harlot had the cheek to protest it.        

The patriarchal elements of such societies not only serve to protect criminals, but also isolate their female victims. There was a recent case where a young woman in India committed suicide a few months back because the police refused to act on her allegations that she’d been raped during the Hindu festival of Diwali. They believed her story however they just didn’t care and obviously they and couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it.

Few issues have convulsed India since its independence in 1947 more than the gang-rape of a 23-year-old medical student by five men and a 17-year-old boy in a moving bus in Delhi on the night of December 16 of 2012.

The young student and her boyfriend who was going home after watching a film were tricked into a chartered bus by the men inside the bus and then gang-raped, then beaten up while the driver took his turn driving around the city with the windows covered by curtains. Finally after several hours, the two victims were thrown off the bus naked to perish on the side of a road in the cold winter night. The girl survived briefly, but succumbed to her terrible injuries after being treated in a Singapore hospital. A nationwide fury broke out when further details of the crime emerged. One of the six fiends had inserted a rusted L-shaped iron rod (used to operate a jack to change flat tires on buses) up inside the woman after the fiends sexually assaulted her. This is what resulted in her dying later.

And now comes another horror story related to this incident. While they lay on the roadside naked and freezing, auto-rickshaws, cars and people on bikes slowed down to stare at the nude couple who were obviously in distress and then continued driving down the road. Pedestrians hearing the pleadings of the boyfriend ignored his pleas for help and walked away. Eventually three police vans arrived and the police dolts argued with one another trying to establish which of their police stations the couple should be taken too. Finally they were taken to a hospital that was further away than a closer one. It took two hours to get to that hospital. At the hospital, the staff was reluctant to give the victim’s immediate help. The boyfriend was forced to ask for the use of a cellphone so that he could call his relations. It is when the relations arrived with money, the doctors then began treating the victims. Meanwhile the boyfriend had to beg the staff for clothes to wear. What kind of animals could be so indifferent to such agony suffered by the two victims? People in India, naturally. Perhaps not everyone but I don’t think I am wrong when I say the vast majority of them are indifferent to the suffering of others. Shame on the lot of them.

It is now that there have been huge protests against the chronic abuse women face, calls in Parliament for reform, and promises of tougher laws against sexual violence. Many are asking that the five adults be sentenced to hang and quite frankly, I am of the same view. I would also like the 17-year-old to be hanged also because it is alleged that he was the most violent of the six. Unfortunately, he will only have to serve three years in custody as per the law in India. What is unusual  for India is that  a fast-track court has been set up to try five of the assailants for murder, rape, kidnapping and other offences, and prosecutors have just announced they will press for the death penalty. This clamour for vengeance on behalf of a young woman President Pranab Mukherjee hailed as “a brave daughter of India,” who fiercely fought her attackers and battled for her life, is understandable given the horrific nature of the crime.

Minor fixes have been promised or made in the wake of this tragedy. In New Delhi there will be special courts to expedite assault cases. More women police will be recruited. A telephone hotline has been set up for women in distress. Buses will be better policed. But the sheer scope of sexual violence resists easy solutions.

Indian women have long suffered from political insensitivity to their safety. The culture in which they live notoriously honours boys over girls. It lionizes macho Bollywood heroes who rarely take “No” for an answer. It winks at sexual molestation, allows accused rapists to run for elected office, and routinely discounts victims’ testimony or blames them for provoking their assailants. When abused women refuse to be shamed into silence and do press charges, they face ineffective police investigations and a sclerotic court system that results in too few convictions and then are shunned by their families and friends. It is small wonder they want to commit suicide.

India has a liberal constitution. It has laws that nominally uphold women’s rights. The time has come for those rights to be enforced to the letter of the law. It is also time for families to reform themselves so that they understand the rights and needs of girls and women and treat them with the same kindness and respect that they do with boys and men. 

In India there has always been a preference for female babies. Approximately 1000 female fetuses are aborted every day which means that an estimated 12 million female festuses were aborted in the past 30 years. It is more prevalent among educated and rich parents than the illiterate poor who see sons as insurance for their old age and who dread having daughters to whom they have to provide the dowries if they want them to be married. 

Unfortunately, the Indian male’s conduct towards the females in their nation is so ingrained with hatred and indifference towards girls and women, it will probably take many generations before Indian males change their attitudes towards their females comes about. Until that happens, we in the Westernized nations who believe in equality for all,  will still think of India as a backward country.