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India to mark 50 yrs of independence with wariness & hope
NEW DELHI, Aug 4: The monsoon rains are sweeping away the dust and torpor of summer just as the round, weighty figure of "50" has Indians embarking on a bout of mental housekeeping, reports AP.
The 50th anniversary of independence from Britain is no time of celebration in Harbans Singh's tiny room at a home for old freedom fighters."
He recalls that when he was the age of his 15-year-old grandson, he was serving his first Jail term — for joining a march against British rule. The grandson's main interests are motorbikes and classes at a technical school, not politics, and Singh doesn't blame him.
"In those days there was a sense of belonging, of giving to your country, said Singh, an 80-year-old who still sometimes wears a dhoti. a wrap of rough white cloth familiar to anyone who has seen pictures of Mohandas Gandhi leading independence marches. Today, there is nothing to belong to.
nothing to give to.
Like many of his generation, Singh was fighting not Just for independence, but for a social revolution that would close the gap between rich and poor. In nis opinion, all that happened at midnight August 14. 1947. was the replacement of a British elite with an Indian one that continued to ignore the plight of the poor.
"All the promises that were made to the people of India, none of those came about. I feel great disappointment that I spent 40 years of my life tn the struggle to come to this at the end of my life," said Singh, who receives a government pension and a housing subsidy in recognition of his role in the independence movement.
N«nda, a biographer of Gandhi and of India's first Rrime minister, Jawaharlal ehru. said that while much remains to be done. India has reason to feel pride.
Perhaps its greatest accomplishment was forging any nation at all out of the myriad peoples brought into one territory by British colonisers.
"It is a state and a society in which there is great diversity, but overarching unity." Nanda said. "It Is fragmented in the sense that we have problems — but they are manageable."
Diverse opinions are only to be expected in a country as large and varied as India. Nearly 970 million people inhabit this nation roughly a third the size of the United States, stretching from the icy Himalayas to the tropical beaches of Cape Comorin.
It is the most populous democracy in the world, with some 600 million voters. But the electorate has become increasingly disgusted with its leaders after a series of corrup tion scandals that reach as high as the prime minister's office.
In this country second only
to China in population, distinctions of language, ethnicity, religion. caste and politics still occasionally erupt into violence, as they did before independence.
Indians speak more than a dozen languages, from Assamese to Urdu. They are Kashmiri and Tibetan. Bengali and Naga. to name just a few of the dozens of ethnic groups. There are Hindus, Muslims. Sikhs and Christians.
The religious divide was considered so unbridgeable in 1947 that Britain partitioned the subcontinent into largely Hindu India and predominately Muslim Pakistan.
The division was accompanied by deadly religious riots and a mass migration — of Hindus from Pakistan to India and Muslims in the other direction. Lingering bitterness erupted three times Into Indo-Pakistani wars, and attempts to improve
relations between the countries have repeatedly faltered.
Like freedom fighter Singh, many Indians are discouraged to find they are still facing the problems that seemed so overwhelming at independence, when Nehru spoke of the "pains of labour" in a sobering speech to the constituent assembly minutes before India became independent.
India celebrates independence day on August 15. the first day of freedom. This year's anniversary is a time To make people think about their history — to take stock," Nanda said.
Nehru wanted India to succeed not only for itself, but to lead the developing world. He believed there was a third way. beyond aligning with what he saw as the imperialism of both Western capitalism and Sovietstyle Communism.
Today, the Soviet Union has
collapsed and with it. seemingly. reason for either a political or economic third way. India is restructuring its economy along Western free market lines, and the influence of the Nonaligned Movement it helped found has declined drastically.
But some Indians still have a sense that the future is theirs, if only because of sheer numbers. They boast of their expanding middle class, the demand abroad for their computer experts. the way they took gifts from the colonisers — the English language, say, or the game of cricket — and made them so indelibly their own.
Nehru pledged to work for "The ending of poverty and Ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity." Fifty years later, his country is listed as the 27th poorest country in the world by the World Bank, but it has made strides.
The United Nations Development Programme says liter-
acy doubled from 1961 to 1992. although half India's adults still cannot read. Life expectancy also doubled, to 61 years, over that time, and infant mortality was more than halved to 74 per 1.000 live births. Between 1951 and 1995, grain production quadrupled and famines were virtually eliminated.
Yet this same painfully poor country has a middle class estimated at 250 million, nearly equal to the entire population of the United States — although in India, owning a bicycle might be enough to quality as middle class.
And India has its share of millionaire Industrialists, computer wizards and artists living in oceanview Bombay penthouses, some of the most expensive real estate in the world.
The state's stranglehold on the economy — nationalised banks and industry, price con-
trois, subsidies meant to help the poor find bread and shelter — brought India to the brink of bankruptcy by the early 1990s.
Reforms begun by former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao in 1991 have opened up the economy. But the bureaucracy remains huge, slow-moving and prone to corruption, vast enterprises are still in state hands and large sectors of the economy have not yet been opened to foreign Investors.
SUU, even the first, tentative steps have created opportunity for Indian business people like Mazhar Hussain, who oversees his family's computer sales firm In the southern city of Hyderabad.
"Despite the grinding poverty people are always talking about, we have made achievements." Hussain said. We are a proud nation But that doesn t mean we should pause here. We have to forge ahead. I am opUmistic As a nation. we are young— and that is our strength