Where is the Citizen Elite of our country?

“Who has a true vision for India? Who among our political leadership has spoken of what India should be; where it should be in 2050? No one thinks beyond the next election,” I have often rued to friends. With the death of Nelson Mandela, have we just lost the last statesman/woman of calibre? Are we then to live in a morass created by mediocre self serving people with little concern beyond themselves and theirs, and the next electoral battle? It was in this context that Dipankar Gupta’s new book, Revolution From Above: India’s Future and the CITIZEN ELITE struck an instant chord and brought in a ray of hope.

On a trip to Basque country in Northern Spain, till recently known for its separatist group ETA and its civil unrest, Gupta found that this area of Spain, with a young leadership made up of people who believe in doing rather than talking, had completely transformed itself into a welfare state with a thriving culture, job opportunities and a high standard of living, higher than Spain. In just over 30 years a visionary and capable leadership brought into action that which the beleaguered people of the area, wanting only peace, had never imagined they needed! A forward thinking and bold leadership had redefined the needs and upped the ante.

Having seen this fast turnaround, Gupta set to thinking about what it was that we lacked and what had changed over 50 years. “I then began looking at India closely and found that we once had our elite of calling, but since then have had more politicians than leaders”. In this book he demonstrates that it is not by elections alone that democracy prospers. “It requires active interventions to take democracy forward and that push can happen only from above….. As all of this requires bold, but not reckless, planning it needs an elite of calling to dig deep and bring out democracy’s many potentials. The people who constitute the elite are of the kind that works for a future, which may even appear utopian, without fearing economic reversals in their personal lives.

They set the pace and think big and, invariably, over a period of time, they win over public opinion”.

Gupta goes on to analyse the big changes that happened in Europe over the last several centuries and finds that in every instance of development it was not the general populace, but these elites who dreamt of a different future and brought changes that lead to increases in standards of living, education and health, in fact to the welfare state, that made these countries what they are today.

Gupta discusses at length what he calls the naturalization of difference, in the context of the first tenet of democracy, i.e. fraternity. Even more than the other two ideals of democracy, equality and liberty, it is fraternity, meaning the acceptance of all human beings as equal, upon which the system rests – and against which human nature acts. All of us, barring a few, see the world in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’. These categories can be of religion, colour, language, caste, gotra or whatever, but we invariably divide the world. And that is in direct opposition to the belief in fraternity enshrined in democracy. Gupta gives example of how many regimes have used the word ‘democracy’ or ‘democratic’ in the names of their countries and regimes, but favoured one religion or one colour or one race. “Human beings, in general, are unhappy with thoroughgoing fraternity and are comfortable instead in bracketing others with cultural tags”. We see this more and more in India, both through politicians playing the caste or religious tags, and by our general behaviour. But that goes against democracy, which must intervene to put in place more fraternity.

Our politicians won’t do this, won’t want to understand, won’t know the need for a vision that imagines the country that we can be. Oh no, for that we need once again those intellectual giants, those committed to a greater India for all, to once again imagine and then activate a country which is beyond the imagination of people toiling towards a secure hunger-free tomorrow.