Tens of millions of middle-class Indians will bid goodbye to 2011with a sigh of relief. For this was surely one of the most tumultuous years in a long time.
While we the middle-class — or should we say the chattering class? — have moaned and groaned under the adversities that the setting year bestowed upon us, there was little time or thought for that huge mass of Indians for whom life has been a grind from time immemorial. But it was we, the educated, employed and well-heeled, who made the most noise as the prices of onion, tomato, rice, wheat — indeed, name anything edible — skyrocketed.
The already overburdened, overwhelmed, boss of the house — who else but the amazing Indian woman — juggled and saved and scrounged to ensure there were decent meals on the table; the children got adequate nutrition through milk, eggs, cheese or whatever; their fees were paid on time, and the rest of the rigmarole that comes in the package of home management.
Telecom saga
On the other hand, the nation watched in wide-eyed horror the unearthing of the 2G spectrum scam. At the very beginning of the year, we watched the CAG putting the 2G spectrum loss at a staggering Rs 1.76-lakh crore. And, even as a former Telecom Minister, who was soon nicknamed “Spectrum” Raja, battled hard to save his skin, his Cabinet colleague, Mr Kapil Sibal, jumped in to his defence with the fantastic claim that the CAG's calculations were “fraught with very serious errors” and “there was no loss at all in the 2G spectrum allocation”.
But while he was pained at the “erroneous methodology” adopted by the CAG in arriving at this colossal figure, Mr Sibal declared grandly at the press conference: “We, however, believe it is human to err and to err is human.”
Thankfully, the Judiciary did not adopt a similar view that it is “human to err and push through corrupt deals” and the entire telecom saga saw the incarceration of Mr Raja and other biggies. Mr Sibal, by the way, ended the year too with a flutter as he tried to gag the social media and received a plethora of sarcastic comments from Indian youth on social networking sites.
The mega corruption indulged in by our politicians and the colossal figures that came out — whether it was the loss to the public exchequer on spectrum allocation or the diversion of whopping amounts of black money to foreign bank accounts — angered middle-class India even more.
While the salaried classes watched helplessly, a chunk of their income going to the government through direct taxes being looted with such gusto, around mid-2011, a tiny, soft-spoken man emerged on the horizon with a pledge to cleanse public life off corruption. The plain-speaking Anna Hazare touched a cord in a population seething at the shenanigans and dark deeds of our politicians.
Anna Hazare
He not only got overwhelming support from the middle-class, the bungling UPA administration made him even bigger a hero by botching up its initial response to Anna's challenge. They arrested him and brought Team Anna onto TV primetime! Over the last six months, Mr Hazare's fight against corruption has assumed various shades of white, black and grey as the government — particularly the Congress party — too fought back to expose the not so-white deeds of members of his team.
Congress leader, Mr Digvijay Singh, in his inimitable style, has gone straight for the jugular, attacking Mr Hazare himself and in his latest salvo against the Gandhian accuses him of being an RSS man. “Anna Hazare worked as secretary with the RSS leader, Nanaji Deshmukh, and was trained in Sangh activities in 1983 in Gonda,” he tweeted. Firing another salvo, again on Twitter, Mr Singh accused Mr Hazare of shifting his fasting venue to Mumbai for “Fund and not Thand ”, alleging that Team Anna saw much bigger opportunities for collecting funds in Mumbai vis-à-vis Delhi.
The jury is still out there on the real persons, organisations and agendas behind the anti-graft movement of Mr Hazare. But a nation exhausted and enraged by the corrupt deeds of its politicians and bureaucrats in places both high and low is more than eager to clutch at this ray of hope, promising to eliminate corruption. Because, in a very long time, India has not seen the phenomenon of an ordinary Indian being able to galvanise large sections and bring a government to its knees.
Darkness and loss
As the curtain falls over a year, almost everybody wants to put behind him/her two factors that have saddened them, and me too, the most.
In horror, I have watched the sheen come off the ‘great India' story during the last 12 months. Even as it appeared that India had come through rather well from the utter pandemonium caused by the global meltdown that began in 2008, we seem to be on a much more slippery ground by end-2011.
The rupee is in free fall, and along with it the equity market, whereas usual the retail or small investors have got pasted, corporate India has complaints galore of policy paralysis and, more, there is a the fresh gloom over the widening gulf between the poor and rich in India. If we are grumbling about the prices of onions — which, ooh la la , have suddenly started dropping — imagine the plight of the BPL millions!
Also, 2011 was particularly cruel in that it snatched away three of our greatest entertainers. First to go was Bollywood lover boy Shammi Kapoor, who had set millions of female hearts aflutter in earlier decades by his effortless romancing of heroines.
Next, the ghazal lost its voice when the silken smooth voice of Indian ghazal king, Jagjit Singh, fell silent so tragically. And, then, we lost the evergreen and debonair Dev Anand. The world lost two irreplaceable people in Steve Jobs and Elizabeth Taylor.
Millions of Indians will grieve over these irreparable losses as they wonder in which direction the rulers will take the country in 2012. At the moment, there doesn't seem much hope… but then, isn't it the darkest before dawn?
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