Dinesh Kamath's Editorial (India today) that was published in Newsband

India today

India has turned 65 years old on 15 August 2012. India is still young. Our country is growing fast.

For both India and Pakistan, August 15 is a great day. The people of both these countries are found to be in jubilant moods on this day.

But the question is has either of the two countries achieved success to the extent they should have?

Jawaharlal Nehru, who was the first Prime Minister of India after independence, had seen a vision of future India. But India is still far away from making that vision a reality. India is moving too slowly towards achieving the dreams that our past leaders had seen. On economic front, we have yet to achieve a lot.

The condition of Pakistan is worse than that of India. Even Pakistan has failed to fulfill the dream of its founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Pakistan, in fact, was expected to grow into a secular and democratic modern nation. But till now most of the time the country was under military rule.

As compared to Pakistan, India definitely has performed much better during the last 65 years, whether it is polity, economy or society. India has succeeded in remaining a democratic and secular nation through out the last 65 years. Not once India was under military rule. That speaks volumes about the clean intentions that people of India harbour in their minds. Indians always opposed terrorism and even today Indians are totally against any kind of terrorist activities.

Indians possess the power to make and break governments. When Indians found a certain government too inefficient, they managed to replace it by another government. This has rarely been the case in Pakistan. Pakistanis, unfortunately, enjoyed the privilege of replacing government only sometimes. Their voices most of the time went unheard due to domination by military.

On economy, Pakistan actually did better than India in terms of per capita incomes until the 1980s. But India recently has stopped seeing Pakistan as the competitor. India has her eye on China. India is trying to race with China and rightly so. India knows that Pakistan cannot match her owing to it being heavily dependent on foreign aids. India, in fact, is concentrating more on exploiting creative energies of her own people.

The common thing about the two countries is, both are not totally free from the curse like poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition and gender discrimination. India can call herself developed only when these curse are totally driven away. How much more time will India require to achieve the status of totally developed country?