INDIA:For most Indians, social and economic justice is still not a reality, writes Rahul Bediin New Delhi
India celebrates its 60th year of independence today with a conflicting bag of achievements and failures.
Its slow but inexorable emergence on the world stage as a robust democracy, a forceful and burgeoning economy and an information technology giant have belied the apocalyptic predictions of British colonists, who cynically partitioned the sub-continent in 1947, and other western pundits.
In perhaps the most troubled of upheavals of the 20th century, the departing British split the sub-continent into a secular India sandwiched between a hostile Muslim West and East Pakistan - the latter broke away in 1971 after a bitterly fought insurgency and a war, to become Bangladesh.
The division led to more than one million people being slaughtered in sectarian clashes between Muslims on one side and Hindus and Sikhs on the other. More than 10 million refugees crossed the hastily and somewhat arbitrarily drawn frontiers in one of history's largest mass migrations and moving accounts of separated families, many of whom have never met since.
After decades of teetering precariously under progressively inefficient and corrupt governments, a venal and regressive command economy, technological apartheid by the West, numerous wars and debilitating insurgencies, India emerged in the 21st century as a vibrant and wealthy nation feted by a world anxious to tap into its new-found riches.
"India as a chaotic but functioning anarchy somehow stumbled through," accountant Lalita Krishnamurthy says. But it has still got a long way to go, he adds.
India's switch in the early 1990s to a market economy resulted after 2001 in an average gross domestic product growth of about 8 per cent - the world's second highest after China - and a buoyant stock market that triggered a rash of domestic self confidence.
This was further bolstered by "reverse colonisation" as Indian entrepreneurs and businessmen began acquiring massive western industrial conglomerates, outbidding their more established rivals from the developing world. Sadly, the fruits of these achievements have remained confined to just a handful.
"Despite growth, economic empowerment for all remains a distant dream; the institutional framework of our democracy is under great stress," says political scientist Bhanu Pratap Mehta.
For the vast majority of more than 1.2 billion Indians, social, economic and environmental justice is not even a mirage.
A recent survey by the Indian health ministry, the National Family Health Survey, backed by Unicef, revealed that almost 46 per cent of the country's children under the age of three are undernourished. Another survey shows that one-third of the world's poor reside in India.
"Though India is being celebrated as an economic miracle by big businesses and news media, displacement, destruction of livelihood and violation of fundamental rights have reached a new high," said Babu Mathew of ActionAid India.
A study by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector shows that at least 86 per cent of working Indians earn less than 20 rupees or just under half a US dollar a day in spite of the blistering pace of growth of the nation's economy. According to the report, Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in Unorganised Sector, 395 of 457 million workers in India employed in sectors such as agriculture, construction, weaving and fishing, only 0.4 per cent had access to any form of social security. "No social security, pitiable working conditions, extreme poverty, no education, acute gender discrimination, and absent or poorly implemented laws - this is what India's workers live by," senior government official Arjun Sengupta and author of the report said.
Rapidly increasing economic disparities alongside large-scale corruption and maladministration were exacerbating India's deteriorating situation. A steady collapse of governance and the resultant loss of state control over large swathes of territory hindered uniform progress and heightened regional insecurity.
India is fighting at least 14 terrorist and separatist movements of varying rigour and intensity, many with cross-border support and ramifications, in addition to northern Kashmir's widely publicised 17-year insurgency.
Over the decades, these lesser known "wars" have claimed thousands of lives, destroyed properties and rendered millions homeless. They have stifled development in tribal regions and required the deployment of security forces, including the army, to combat them at great cost.
This has led to a cycle of widespread human rights abuses and the imposition of draconian laws, further exacerbating social tensions and driving innocent victims to bolster militant cadres.
Security officials privately admit that the writ of the Indian state does not run across large parts of the northeastern states of Nagaland and Manipur, which border Myanmar, where dozens of armed separatist groups operate parallel administrations to which even the provincial governments defer.
The rebels levy monthly taxes from locals, including civil servants, politicians and even the police, and indulge in extortion and kidnapping, issuing receipts for all collections. These run into millions of rupees, which are duly audited and balance sheets published with impunity in local newspapers. Worse conditions prevail across large portions of 170 of India's 604 administrative districts in 14 of India's 28 states, where Maoist rebels are on the ascendant.
In 2006 the prime minister, Manmohan Singh admitted that militant Maoists had seized control of the "instruments of state administration" and their "people's war" was India's biggest internal security challenge. This has led to increased military spending. According to the US Congressional Research Service, India was also the leading importer of conventional arms among developing nations in 2005, beating China to second place for two years running.
New Delhi clinched $5.4 billion worth of defence imports compared with China's $2.8 billion to maintain parity with nuclear rivals Beijing and Pakistan.
But all is not doom and gloom in the newly emerging India.
Bollywood, for instance, is on the ascendant globally as are yoga, Indian fashion, writers, food and minimalism, all feted particularly in the West.
"However disordered India might be, it is diverse, colourful and, unlike the West, definitely not boring," fashion designer Rita Paul says.