The worst reason put forth to justify holding the Commonwealth Games (CWG) in New Delhi was that this grand event would showcase a brilliant new India to the world. It would be the window through which the whole international community would see India in a novel light rather than out of the tinted frames of the past that showed our nation as a murky, backward, hopelessly slothful, barely sub-Saharan land.
When the Commonwealth window opened, the sights and sounds that the world beheld negated all the positive branding of our nation that has been occurring over the last decade – “India Shining”, “Incredible India”. Today, the India brand, as projected by CWG, is a disagreeable cocktail of filth, inefficiency, venality, lack of national pride, waste, fraud and corruption.
This international perception was noticeable not only in the media and comments of ordinary people in Commonwealth countries but also in papers like The New York Times whose only interest in CWG was the opportunity it gave their correspondents to report what is drastically wrong with India. All the glitz and glamour and gyrations of Bollywood, all the laser shows meant, ultimately, nothing. Bollywood will go on with its dancing and singing. Laser shows will continue to mesmerize. They showcase their own art forms, not India.
In any case, what was the pressing need to spend thousands of crores of rupees to “showcase” India to the world? Who cares? Why are we stuck with the slave mentality that we must periodically dance before our former masters in order to sustain our self-confidence?
Have our rulers ever considered that more important than “showcasing” themselves to the world, is to showcase the importance of service to the hapless Indian public? The best exhibition of itself that India can offer to the world is of a nation deeply committed to good governance, the uplift of the poor, and sustainable development. It does not need huge amphitheatres and auditoria for this. It needs, instead, the stage of India.
On this stage we need to see Indians working for India. We need to see our sewage systems and garbage disposal mechanisms in their proper channels rather than overflowing on our streets and playing host to vermin and germs that infect our citizens; we need to convert our sewers back into the rivers they were (before they turned into sewers); we need to see fearless town planners standing in the way of encroachments; we need to see our village schools bursting with qualified teachers; we need to see the elimination of year-long queues of people lined up for justice in front of indifferent courts.
Yes, we need to see the arm of good governance reaching out without fear or favour to every doorstep of rural and urban areas, trying within the reasonable limits of human endeavour to ensure the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and justice. We need to see our jails full – of crooked politicians, businessmen and the bureaucrats who aid mismanagement and corruption.
Showcasing the best of what India can and should achieve to the Indians themselves would be the finest exhibit that our nation can put on show for the rest of the world. CWG-type bread-and-circus tamashas are no substitute for good governance. They put into the public glare not what is the best in us but what is the worst.
