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No surrender
By India Stock Research | November 30, 2008
The attacks on Mumbai are abominable. They are also unacceptable. The people of India and the community of people that support India should not accept it.
A country is not a country until it can provide security to its citizens. Since acquiring power in 2004, the Congress party led coalition’s record on security is terrible, pathetic and disgraceful. How can a government claim to be governing when it obviously cannot provide its citizens security?
V.S. Naipaul in his first book on India, “India: An Area of Darkness” captured the essence of the problem of India: India’s willingness to simply look past the sufferring of the people right in front of them and revel instead in its ancient culture and that culture’s historical significance. That was then.
The India of today is as much about the modern and the new as the old. The India that Naipaul looked at was a “A Wounded Civilization,” (and the title of his second book on India) still decrepit from the relatively recent British colonization experience and an older, ancient hurt stemming from Muslim rule. India has finally left those experiences behind and is pursuing a future that is modern, pluralist, democratic and capitalist. In its ambition and scope, there is nothing to compare it to except the United States of America.
However, those ambitions are meaningless if India cannot provide the most rudimentary benefit that a modern country offers its citizens: personal security.
What good are the astonishing successes of the Ambanis or Tatas or the extraordinary changes wrought by Wipro and Infosys if their employees and their customers walk in fear of being gunned down as they sit down for lunch or dinner?
The trust entrusted by the people in the government is at minimum a trust to maintain a citizen’s right to exist. Without the right to exist, there is no need to worry about the right to vote, the right to free speech, the right to vote or the benefits of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, pluralistic country.
What good are the great ideals of the past and the newer ideals of prosperity, generational progress and opportunity without the prospect of living to enjoy them?
Personal security is the first ideal of a modern country, especially one that aspires to be a great power. Without it, nothing can follow.
India has taken the first tentative steps to refashion itself into a global power. Should not its citizens and the global community of businessmen, diplomats, tourists, expatriates and the vast Indian diaspora that is helping facilitate this transformation be accorded the security that follows from that status?
Our answer is Yes.
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