India Political Blog

India needs reform at many levels. There is the need to get away with the license Raj, where the Government believed that everybody needs to live by rules (so far so good), and they cannot be expected to comply with these rules and hence need regular inspection, resulting in incredible levels of corruption. This is slowly going away (slowly being the word). Another area is the need to reform the bureaucracy, the steel framework of India, which has mostly rusted. The bureaucracy in India is one of the most corrupt and tainted bodies, strongly supportive of the whims of the politician, where honest people either wither away or live a life resigned to not making much of a difference.
The biggest area in which Indian society needs to be reformed is the politician-police nexus. Unlikely would be the case of finding a citizen who is not either personally or indirectly been affected by the corruption of this nexus. A policeman is the force of law and order in our society, and has almost unparalleled power, being subject to only either a higher bureaucrat or policeman, or indirectly to the politician. However, this power brings with it a great responsibility, and this is where the police force falls flat. Historically, the police force has been the force of state rule, and this is now entrenched in India. A policeman decides who has done right or wrong, delivers immediate justice (in terms of punishment to some degree); and most importantly, decides whether a person can be spared (even if the person is doing a crime).
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Our dear Health Minister, Dr. Ramadoss has 2 pet obsessions, one being to prevent tobacco from being displayed anywhere, the other being to prevent Dr. Venugopal to be there in AIIMS. The courts and now the cabinet have blocked the Health Minister from taking immediate action against Dr. Venugopal. No matter, he can still proceed on his inspired mission against tobacco.
Now, to make matters clear, I don’t smoke, and I believe that cigarette smoking is harmful. The better objective would be to try and make the consumption of tobacco illegal, but that would harm political interests because of the supposed large number of people involved in tobacco cultivation (although the same argument could be be used if you had free-for-all opium cultivation; a large number of people would get involved in opium cultivation and you would not be able to ban it).
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