The Morass of Bad Faith!!

Astounding as it may seem, the Supreme Court of India has said, that the Hindus praying in the belief that a particular place is the birthplace of their God is enough to displace the claims of Muslims to pray in the same place even if they were doing so there from centuries before in pursuit of their own faith. The fact that faith has such a big say in public matters in India has been the bane of development in this country.
Faiths of various kinds have been the problem right since the time of independence. In fact the faith in the possibility of bringing about environmentally sustainable and socio-economically equitable development through modern industrial growth whether of the capitalist or socialist variety has contributed to even greater problems than the faith in Gods. Faith compounded by casteism has meant that bigotry of all kinds instead of justice has been the watch word in India.
Even though fundamental rights were guaranteed in the Constitution, the crucial rights to free quality education, free quality health services and to work that could ensure a dignified life were put into the directive principles of state policy and made non-justiciable. This effectively negated the possibilities of the vast poverty and caste oppression ridden masses from being able to actualise the fundamental rights, especially the right to a dignified life, that were guaranteed in the Constitution. Indeed to pursue a policy of industrial development, primitive accumulation was resorted to by keeping agricultural product prices and wages depressed and also by displacing people without proper resettlement and rehabilitation. The belief, which has now been proved to be false, was that by making huge investments in centralised industrial development it would be possible to alleviate poverty through the trickling down of benefits to the poor. The adverse consequences of this bad faith are as follows -
1. Girls instead of being sent to school were as before married off as soon as they reached puberty and so they had higher fertility rates that not only combined with their lack of education, severely restricted their freedoms but also contributed to a huge population growth.
2. The economy is a demand constrained one as over 70 per cent of the population directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture does not have disposable incomes and so the industrial growth also was muted and there is widespread, unemployment, poverty and hunger and just 57 billionnaires control 70 percent of the country's wealth.
3. Lack of free quality education and health services has resulted in low productivity of the population. Thus, not only do we have a huge number of people, they are also of low productivity and so we are not able to compete with other countries, especially China, which with its much higher productivity is flooding the country with cheap products.
4. Chemical agriculture along with excessive construction of dams and withdrawal of groundwater has devastated farming and contributed to water stress apart from deforestation and land degradation.
5. Dependence on fossil fuel energy as opposed to renewable energy which contributes to a huge current account deficit on account of crude oil imports, devastation of the environment on account of coal mining, severe financial stress due to the economic unviability of centralised production and distribution of electricity and a lack of energy security.
This cancer of bad faith has now engulfed all institutions of the country and it is heading head long into disaster. When a newly constructed toilet in a village in Uttar Pradesh is built as if it is a temple and painted in saffron and people begin praying to it, then the morass of bad faith has well and truly become all pervasive.