The Political Theatre in India
India is one of the largest democracies in the world. Yet, its complexities are directly linked to its horrible politicians, who have totally ruined the country, and have successfully made it a country of problems galore. However, there has been development too. This article is an attempt to discuss the finer details of how this development goes hand in hand with corruption.
However, there has been development too.
In India, which has millions of highly responsible people, there are hundreds of thousands of politicians who have made politics a business. There is not a single political party that has not made money through politics — only the scale of the loot will vary, but the loot is common.
To understand the dimensions of this loot, we have to understand the National and the regional parties and their recent political ambitions. Firstly, there is the Indian National Congress party, which has a rich tradition of being the only national party, with a presence in every State of India. Even while regional parties in every State in India have grown by leaps and bounds in the past two decades, there is still one national party that is seen as a truly national party. This is only the Congress.
In 1984, it lost its major leader. Smt Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister. Though very corrupt, this iron lady had the courage to take on the worst of politicians like Bal Takery of the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra and rule the country quite well. Not many people in the world know that it was due to her deep insight of the perils of uncontrolled capatalism that she nationalised the banks and made such banks follow a regulatory framework, that helped millions of rural masses to have access to credit facilities. In fact, over the years, the Nationalised banks have become very powerful and are the backbone of the Indian Banking System. They have invested in advanced technology like ATMs, anywhere banking facilities, and so on. In fact, there is not much difference between the facilities offered by India’s nationalised banks and those of the foreign banks. The facilities offered by the Nationalised banks are much cheaper. This was her major success.
Indira Gandhi was succeeded by Rajiv Gandhi, her son, and a former Indian Airlines pilot. He secured a huge majority in the Lok Sabha elections to the Parliament, and formed the next Government. To his credit, he revolutionalised the telecom revolution by handing over the responsibility to a very able administrator, Sam Pitroda. This leader made the STD revolution work in India. The telecom network, as it exists in India, is a very viable network, and one can easily talk through the STD phones from one end of the country to the other. However, Rajiv Gandhi was caught in one major scandal called the Bofors Scandal, and one Mr. V.P Singh who was finance minister in his cabinet, became the rallying point against him.
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