Over the past fortnight I have visited the three most important Democracies in the world – US (as it prepares for an election), UK of course, and now in India (the largest). What do you find in such close examination? Something startling.
I have been fortunate enough to visit the home in Delhi where Gandhiji spent his final day, the home in Gujarat where Sardar Patel was born, and thanks to flights delays rewatch Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi on my iPod at the airport.
There is a spirit of the founding fathers (and mothers) of a nation which should be more invoked in a country’s politics. Consider President Obama’s inaugural speech when he did exactly that;
“In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:"Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive ... that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it."
Gandhiji and Patel were barristers – they had no need to spend years in cockroach infested prisons. Or consider the patriots described in the book ‘Remember Us Sometimes Once in A While’ who wrote to their wives and children why they were willing to be hanged for their sedition against the British Crown during the Independence movement. And hanged they were.
And if Cromwell could be considered the founding father of the modern British Parliament then his speech to Parliament could aptly be invoked today targeted at British Parliamentarians and those of the US Congress and the Indian Parliament – in large measure – though not applicable to all by any means, where he said, “...It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.
“Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter'd your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?
“Ye sordid prostitutes, have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd; your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse the Augean Stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings, and which by God's help and the strength He has given me, I now come to do.
Politics has become a home of prostitutes, weak characters without spines. But actually, it has always been thus. We only need a few good men to lead. India has them. The US is afraid it does not. Britain – watching the debates on disabilities – the question is open.
