A couple of days ago, a Scottish delegate
got a shock of his life this week when he saw a dog shitting on a bed
inside a 'swanky' apartment in the Commonwealth Games village in Delhi.
The Scotsman clicked a photo of the dog, and now the picture is part of
the evidence submitted by the Scottish delegation to the Organising
Committee to prove that the multi-million dollar village is not fit for
"human habitation". In the past few days, foreign TV crews and
photographers have been busy chasing and clicking photos of dogs –
peeing and shitting in the apartments, running on practice tracks,
jumping into swimming pools and sleeping under the police cars and other
vehicles parked at Games sites and venues. The foreigners are horrified
– and scared – by the sight of street dogs running wild at the
"sanitized areas". For them, it's a sign that India is not ready for the
Games and the infrastructure here is not "world class".

 

There
is no doubt now that India's carefully created, and airbrushed, image
of an 'emerging superpower' and the 'second-fastest growing economy' in
the world rots in the piles of rubbish across Delhi. The myth of 'India
Shining' (BJP's slogan) and 'India Rising' (the Congress' slogan) has
been busted. We have proved to the world – and to ourselves as well –
that we are a third world banana republic which is falling into a
bottomless pit.

 

I am not worried about the
mismanagement at the Games sites. We shouldn't have organized the Games
at all. The country which in 63 years of independence hasn't been bale
to provide proper living houses, clean drinking water, uninterrupted
electricity, fulltime jobs, healthy food, clean air and free education
to all its citizens despite spending trillions of dollars, how did you
expect the same country to pull off an international sporting event
without it sinking into the slime and grime of corruption and bad
governance.

 

I am not justifying corruption, but
it's a fact that graft is part and parcel of capitalism, though the
level differs from country to country. This has been proved by western
politicians and Wall Street bankers in the past couple of years. In US,
the bankers and financial giants robbed the American people, mostly the
middle and working-class, clean and then declared themselves bankrupt,
and they were bailed out by the US government with public money. This
was the world's biggest daylight robbery. And no one, except Michael
Moore, raised a red flag. 

 

In the US, this brazen
act of corruption made thousands of houses go under water and millions
jobless, but in India something more sinister and dark has happened in
the garb of the Games. In the past two years, the governments of this
country and this city have launched a full-scale war on the poor.
Millions of poor people from the country's dustbowls have been brought
here to work at the Games construction sites. They have been working day
and night at the venues and living like animals under plastic sheets,
sleeping on wet ground and eating filthy food.  That food is just about
enough to keep their body and soul together so that they can build the
glass and chrome buildings and showcase India Shining to the world.

In
21st century India, the street dogs are luckier than the poor. The dogs
make news for shitting in swanky beds and the poor workers go to
snake-infested swamps to take a leak at night, get bitten and die and
not a soul is stirred.

On one hand the
government has brought these people from poverty-ravaged villages to
work on its corruption-tainted buildings, and on the other hand lakhs of
hard-working but poor people have been thrown out of the city so that
the foreigners coming here for the Games do not see the ugly side of
India. Thousands of people living in Yamuna Pushta area were plucked
from their houses and dumped on a piece of wasteland in Haryana. Beggars
were packed off earlier. Now, the police are scanning the slums of
Delhi and Gurgaon and people are being forced to take trains back to
their villages. These people have been living and working here for years
and suddenly they have been asked to leave. The government doesn't want
any filth in the city during the Games. It's putting bamboo screens in
front of the slums.

But, now the filth is out
in the open. The mismanagement and corruption has been exposed by the
photos of dirty, filthy and unhygienic apartments at the Games village.
And guess who gets blamed for it. Not the politicians or babus or
contractors but the poor workers at the site.  And when 27 workers got
injured on Wednesday when the footbridge near the JL Nehru stadium
collapsed, they were herded like animals into private vehicles and
dumped at a sarkari hospital. No ambulance for them, no post-recovery
package for them. Just Rs 50,000 in damages for broken legs, heads and
spinal chords.

And, to hide the hide the
accident near the Nehru stadium, the area was cordoned off and cops in
full riot gear were stationed so that ordinary people and media and
foreigners can't get anywhere near the site of one more horrendous
accident. Suddenly, the government has one solution for every problem
across the country: post heavily-armed police and paramilitary men at
the scene of a "disturbance" and give them a license to shoot at will.
It happens everyday in Srinagar. It's happening everyday in the jungles
of Chhattisgarh. It's happening in the villages of West Bengal. It's
happening in the villages of UP. Now, with Ayodhya verdict round the
corner, the temple town is being turned into a fortress with men in
khaki swarming over it.

These are the symptoms
of a failed state. We make tall claims about growth, but we treat out
poor worse than animals. We aspire to be world power, but we can't even
provide drinking water to all our citizens. We claim to be world's
biggest democracy, but we 'solve' all our social and political problems
with loaded guns in hand. It's time we accepted that we are a banana
republic and we are going to the dogs.

source: http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Main-Street/entry/we-are-a-banana-republic-and-it-s-going-to-the-dogs