Corruption in India: Roots, Challenges, Solutions

There doesn't need to be a commentary on the problem of corruption in India. It is widespread and infecting every nerve and cell of the governmental administrative system. It's important to ax the tree at the root in order to destroy it.

ROOTS
The problem is systemic. One who gets into it usually ends up practicing it not just because others are practicing it, but because he might have got into the system through a corrupt mechanism of bribery on one hand. On the other, it may also mean that there are people out there who are willing to keep the mechanism going for their own benefit, meting injustice to the poor, and, perhaps, avoiding it would mean a loss of job or favor.

CHALLENGES
The challenge is not to uproot the wheat with the weed. There are many still in the system who are right, while the judicial system that relies mainly on evidences would fail to find some to condemn the corrupt. There is also the danger that the just ones are falsely condemned in place of or with the corrupt. The challenge is not chiefly for retributive justice, but for corrective justice.

SOLUTIONS
Plato compared the State to the human body. Administration of proper drugs can weed out diseases and allow natural healing to take place. Truth is the best drug. Justice is the result of it. To a great extent, entertainment media and traditional cultures foster false world-views and expectations that provide real space for corruption as a quick alternative. These have to be adequately and properly countered by truth.

Minimum doses of Truth will not work. Since the disease is heavy, the doses need to be heavy and voluminous. Information has power. Hitler knew that and the Nazi government thrived on a system of heavy propaganda. The propaganda was false, therefore the results were disastrous. The modern world doesn't have time for truth. It wants anything that could bring fast wealth, prosperity, and materialist meaning in life. This is submission of spirit to brute forces. It is only when matter fails that people realize they need to halt and seek spiritual wisdom. Those who realize experience a gradual but happy convalescence. In order to bring healing to the nation, we need more ambassadors of truth who will stand for it, in their own little corners, bringing light to the darkest sections of our community.

Truth is Victorious. Truth Prevails. But, it can't without its ambassadors. Candles need to be burnt, lanterns need to be taken out in the open. Who will do it? Not those who are enslaved; only those who are free.

Happy Independence Day!

Happy Independence Day India!!! Love you multiple times over!! God bless India!!!

Soar over the rainbow,
Leave behind a trail of colors,
May the nations see your grandeur,
May the Lord grant you multiple favors!!
Jai Hind!! Jai Bharat!!

The Gods Have Gone Asleep Today For Four Months - Local News Report, India

An intriguing article features on the lower left column of a local Hindi newspaper. The headline runs "Devata Gaye Char Maah Ke Shayan Par" (The Gods Have Gone To Bed For Four Months).

After the Devashayani Ekadashi today (Monday, July 11), the news reports, all good and auspicious events will have to stall for the next four months. Ashaḍh Shukl Ekadashi is known as the Devashayani Ekadashi, after which the four months begin. The belief is that the gods go to bed after the Shayani Ekadashi.

The gods will wake up, reportedly, eleven days after Dipawali in the month of November, giving a green signal for all marriages, mangalik, and auspicious works to begin. The next four Hindi months, Savan, Bhado, Kkar, and Kartik are not good (Shubh Muhurta) for mangalik activities.

This, by the way, is also regarded as the Harivasara Ekadasi or Vishnu Sayana Ekadasi during which time the Lord Vishnu is considered to go into cosmic sleep. It marks the beginning of Chaturmas Puja or the vrata of the four holy months.
__________________

However, God Almighty, the Infinite, Sovereign, All-Powerful One, doesn't go to bed for sure - if He did, the Universe would collapse.

Biblical Promise:

He will not let your foot slip-
he who watches over you will not slumber; indeed, he who watches over Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep. The LORD watches over you-
the LORD is your shade at your right hand;
(Psa 121:3-5)

Nobel Peace Prize 2010: China

The unclaimed Nobel document and medal were placed in an empty chair meant for Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Photo: Reuters

December 10 was celebrated as Human Rights Day throughout the world, and theNobel Peace Prize was placed on an empty chair yesterday at Oslo, Norway – the Laureate, Liu Xiaobo (b. 1955), a Chinese writer, professor, and human rights activist was in prison, being imprisoned by the Chinese government last year for 11 years. The Chinese government denied him the right of having a representative collect the prize for him.

Liu is the third person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while in prison or detention, after Germany’s Carl von Ossietzky (1935) and Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi (1991), and the only one other than Ossietzky not to be present or represented by close family at the awards ceremony. The Nobel diploma and the prize was symbolically placed by Jagland on an empty chair meant for the absent laureate. Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann then took to the podium and read I Have No Enemies, a speech by Liu made during his trial in December 2009.

“I, filled with optimism, look forward to the advent of a future, free China. For there is no force that can put an end to the human quest for freedom, and China will in the end become a nation ruled by law, where human rights reign supreme.”

—Liu Xiaobo, I Have No Enemies, 23 December 2009

The proceedings were televised by international media, but broadcast signals on CNN and BBC inside China were reportedly blocked. [Wikipedia]

Let’s continue to pray for China that the nation may experience peace and the people live in freedom from all fear of fellowmen. May God give peace to China, the great land that has given so much out of its generous culture to the world! May the officials of the land receive wisdom and understanding from above to see fellow humans with the eyes of God and fulfill their duties to the nation in the spirit of love and justice, without which the world will never be a meaningful place! May God bless China!

600,000 Dying of Inhaling Second-hand Smoke Annually

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NEW DELHI: Second-hand smoke (SHS) is killing six lakhs annually, including 1.65 lakh children before they reach their fifth birthday. A study by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 192 countries -- the first of its kind to assess all deaths caused by SHS has found that tobacco kills nearly 5.7 millions globally every year, including 5.1 millions who die from their own smoking. The rest perish, thanks to passive smoking. 

Only 7.4% of global population live in countries that boast of laws to prevent smoking in public places. Though India has banned smoking in public places, its stringent implementation has left a lot to be desired. 


Read more: '6L dying of inhaling second-hand smoke annually' - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/6L-dying-of-inhaling-second-hand-smoke-annually/articleshow/6996474.cms#ixzz16eVsqeUn

The War of Kalinga and Modern Religious Conscience

A view of the banks of the River Daya, also the supposed battlefield of Kalinga from atop Dhauli hills (Wikipedia)

In around 260 BC, King Ashoka of theMauryan Empire invaded the Republic of Kalinga, now in modern day Orissa, engaging in a bloody battle that within a short period of time caused such massive destruction that it appalled the chronicles of time. It was the first and the only battle that Ashoka is said to have fought, following which he encountered a profound change of heart and gave up violence. The conquest did make Ashoka an absolute monarch over a great part of theIndian sub-continent; the change of heart, however, stripped him of any desire for further military conquests. The massive loss of life and suffering caused by this war weighed heavily on the mind of the King and plunged him into deep remorse. On the 13th of his 14 Major Rock Edicts, he inscribes:

On conquering Kalinga the Beloved of the Gods felt remorse, for, when an independent country is conquered, the slaughter, death and deportation of the people is extremely grievous to the Beloved of the Gods and weighs heavily on his mind… Even those who are fortunate to have escaped, and whose love is undiminished, suffer from the misfortunes of their friends, acquaintances, colleagues and relatives…

This inscription of dhamma has been engraved so that any sons or great-grandsons that I may have should not think of gaining new conquests, and in whatever victories they may gain should be satisfied with patience and light punishment. They should only consider conquest by dhamma to be a true conquest, and delight in dhamma should be their whole delight, for this is of value in both this world and the next. [as quoted by John Keay, India: A History, 92-93]

“Herein lies the greatness of Ashoka,” writes R.K. Mookerji, “… at least no victorious monarch in the history of the world is known to have ever given expression to anything like it” [Ibid]. The conversion was total and it unleashed a rare time in the history of India known as the Golden Age of Indian history.

Kalinga and Maurya Empire before invasion of Ashoka (Wiki)

Though seemingly deriving several principles of statecraft from Kautilya’s Arthasastra, Akbar resorted to the ideology of dhamma as derived from Buddhism to make the foundation of his rule. Ashoka’s remorse had a ready remedy in the already existing Buddhist dhamma, with which he did have contacts from his previous stay at Avanti and his marriage to Devi (Vidisha-mahadevi), a Buddhist. The remorse was decisive, but even more important was the availability of the religion of non-violence in the form of Buddhism, and Buddhist chroniclers waste no efforts trying to depict the pre-Buddhist Ashoka as a monstrously demonic ruler, whose evil mind had to go through Kalinga to experience the decisive change. It is recorded that some 100,000 people were slain and 150,000 deported during the Kalinga War. The subjugated Kalingans were treated in accordance to the principles of Arthasastra: “having acquired new territory the conqueror shall substitute his virtues for the enemy’s vices and where the enemy was good, he shall be twice as good. He shall follow policies that are pleasing and beneficial by acting according to his dharma and by granting favours and exemptions, giving gifts and bestowing honours.” [Keay, 92]

The presence of a non-violent religious conscience was strongly felt throughout the Golden reign of Ashoka. It’s absence was horrifically sensed in the modern fascist regimes rooted in the dehumanizing roots of Darwinism. Darwinism accomplished the reduction of man to a mere biological being. Spirituality was stripped of any significance. Two powerful ideologies, viz. Fascism and Marxism, that plunged the world into horrific crimes against humanity ensued from its principles. These philosophies stood strongly opposed against virtues of the religious conscience. In his book The Antichrist, Nietzsche blatantly expressed the logical political ethics of Darwinian ideology, ideas that went into shaping the fascist regimes of the 1930s. Not surprisingly, influenced by the Darwinian principles of natural selection, struggle for existence, and survival of the fittest, his doctrine of will to power stood ferociously opposed to the virtues of love and compassion. He wrote:

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)

What is good?–Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.
What is evil?–Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness?–The feeling that power increases–that resistance is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtue, virtue free of moral acid).
The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.
What is more harmful than any vice?–Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak…

I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it. A history of the “higher feelings,” the “ideals of humanity”–and it is possible that I’ll have to write it–would almost explain why man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will–that the values of decadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names…

Pity stands in opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities. Through pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied a thousandfold….

Ustaše guard in a mass grave at Jasenovac concentration camp (Wikipedia)

Shortly after writing this book, Nietzsche suffered nervous breakdown and ended in an asylum where he soon died. But, his megalomaniac philosophy became the fuel of Fascism and Nazism. Both Mussolini and Hitler were influenced by Nietzsche’s vision of the Superman, the Overman (in Thus Spake Zarathustra), which they further interpreted along their socio-historical experiences. The fascist ideas did spread to as far as Japan and the century saw one of the most brutal and violent histories of all time plunging the world into a global Kalinga of World War II. The difference: “Supermen” didn’t have the means of remorse this time. They either committed suicide or were executed by those that defeated them and saved the world from self-destruction. There are instances of crimes against humanity that send a shiver along our spine. The concentration camps of Hitler and the Nanking massacre to mention two. Though opposed to fascism, Communism also viewed man with the anti-spiritual spectacles of naturalism that dehumanized the individual, but with a Hegelian tint to its philosophy of history. Pity was substituted with brutality, where the enemy was not just destroyed, but his humanhood was stripped off. Man, in the age of technology, with advanced weapons, was back to barbarianism. The religious conscience was annihilated.

Among those who did speak of a religious conscience but perpetrated crimes against humanity, their violence was sanctioned by their religious authority, sectarian view of humanity (that dehumanized other people groups), quest for political supremacy, racism, and/or a history of hatred, revenge, and anger.

Gandhi with Rabindranath Tagore, 1940 (Wikipedia)

In the Indian soil, sadly, as Romila Thaparnoted, “the ideology of dhamma died with the death of the emperor [in 231 BC]” [Keay, 99]. After Ashoka, there was none like Ashoka. The modern period was a period of petty kingdoms warring against each other, of numerous social evils like child marriage, sati, casteism, temple prostitution, female infanticide, etc. The East India Company that came into India did put an end to the petty kingdom wars by assuming control over most of the land, however, it didn’t interfere with the local customs. It was missionaries like William Carey and reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy who first began to take a stand against the social crimes sanctioned by religion and community. Consequently, the British administration imposed a ban over several of these.

From this time forth till the Independence of the nation, three major influences could be felt throughout the land: British Evangelicalism, Italian and German Fascism, and Russian Communism. While people like Gandhi and Tagore were influenced by British Evangelicalism, Golwalkar and Hedgewar (RSS) were influenced by Fascism, and Bhagat Singh was influenced by Communism (though these influences had a unique blend with the Indian socio-historical experience). The non-violent and peaceful protest methods that Gandhi upheld had an immense impact on the conscience of the nation. Certainly, as Bertrand Russell noted (and his statement hangs emblazoned in Mahatma Gandhi’s home in Ahmedabad), “It is doubtful that the method of Mahatma Gandhi would have succeeded except that he was appealing to the conscience of a Christianized people.” One wonders if Gandhi’s methods would have had any success in Hitler’s Germany or in the Ottoman Empire. In addition, we do understand the importance of a military to defend the nation. 

However, it is the quality of the religious spirit that fosters a sense of humaneness even at times of war. It teaches one the principle of treating ones neighbour as one would have treated oneself. “Love your neighbour as yourself,” said Jesus and, in addition, “whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them” - the Golden Rule of ethics. The Divine Spirit of Grace works within the human heart against the animal instincts of unrestrained passion for power and pleasure. One can either succumb to the base forces and enter a world of meaningless void and striving with the wind, or submit to Divine Grace and become a beloved of God, Devampriya (a title of Ashoka). Leaders can either destroy or build the nation. History tells us who built and who destroyed. Let us dare to follow the truth!

Sources:
John Keay, India: A History, Harper Perennial, 2004
Kalinga War
Kalinga War
Ashoka
Superman
Social Darwinism
John Allen Tucker, Tokugawa Intellectual History and Prewar Ideology.
Fascism in Japan
Causes of World War II
Crimes against Humanity
The Nanking Massacre
Communism and Crimes against Humanity
Fascism in India
To everyone an answer: Essays in honor of Norman L. Geisler

© Domenic Marbaniang, Saturday, 26 November 2010

Inspiring Change: What India Needs???

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The country has certainly come a great way from 1947. We have seen roads, bridges, schools, colleges, communication, technology, and several multi-dimensional developments. The internet is a boon as ticket bookings (rail, airways, etc) can be done from home - avoiding queues and counter tensions. Also, children are exposed to a brave new world of difference. However, a few things still strike concern.

1. Population. It's estimated that the population will hit 1.4 billion by 2021. That's hot multiplication. This gives rise to several problems in governance. The main one is economic. There needs to be proper production and distribution of resources to meet the basic needs. With more people in the land, there are more individuals with rights that correlate duties by the government. Educational and employment opportunities must also be provided. Then, there are health concerns that the government must address. 

2. Pollution, Scenic, and Culture Problems. This is a grave problem for sure. Somehow, once the giant is aroused and set to go about, it's difficult to stop him. But, hopefully, the introduction of CNG et al. may bring some relief. Smoke, dust, drainage, plastic bags, and a myriad such issues await solutions, yet. We still have dirty railway platforms, bus stations, government offices, damaged roads, and ponds that the government cares less about. These are far from any aesthetic adoration. We shouldn't try to compare, but it's still very easy to spit wherever one wants in India. The same Indian, when he goes out of the country, will have begun to learn that this is not right, and he wouldn't feel to do the same in that kind of a surrounding. The government must learn to create a culture that favors cleanliness.

3. Moral Development & Corruption Issues. The government has failed to be a moral example to the people. Certainly, we learn of moral lessons in the schools; but, go to any usual government office or police station (or try a train travel), corruption is almost ubiquitous. The khadi is now despised as polluted by the police and the politician. Also, liquor is licensed, ruining families. However, thanks for several rights movements and noble men in the government as well who have brought significant reforms to a great extent. Now, ragging is banned; so, are several other social evils that had invaded the cultural fabric. Something more significant is to be done to put an end to human rights violations in red light areas, foot paths, railway platforms, and work places. Also, the censorship board seems to have changed its opinion in the past one decade. One wonders what change it's going to have in the next decade. Does it seem to accept that there are no moral absolutes and that the West in more moral than the East, as far as the Screen is concerned, and that we are still behind in Screen culture???

Image by radicaleye via Flickr

Other issues stand as well. But, following the Lao Tzu method, it's the leadership that is to blame for most of the issues. History teaches us that one leader can lead the whole nation to hell (e.g. King Manasseh, Adolf Hitler). History also teaches us that one leader can lead the whole nation into a brave world. The leaders must learn to lead and not just manage the status quo. It's not economic strength that determines the strength of the nation, it is conscience and the commitment to truth and love. Each individual of the nation is a leader in his/her own sphere. Please step to be an example, play your role right, and start the transformation of the nation. But, remember, leaders never quit - they lead us to the destiny, they carry the banner to the pinnacle.