India faces a unique civil war — the battle of dreams. There is an India that is determined to dream but another India, older, elite-er, pungent, gnarled with the sleepless-ness of greed that is resolute in choking to death every hopeful slumber. This blood-soaked collision is the most important theme as the world’s largest democracy, and, off-and-on, its fastest growing economy, turns 70 on August 15.

Mock image of the infamous Russian Sleeping Experiment from here.

What do most Indians want? They want to fall asleep, gently, and dream about clean streets, water that can be drunk off the tap, efficient hospitals, on-time transportation, schools where there is real teaching, and when they pay, they expect not to be cheated.

This is so simple that the Indian elite runs, incessantly, the Russian Sleeping Experiment on everyone else. This experiment is almost certainly an urban legend but it is also eerily apt for what is happening in India today.

In this experiment, said to be from the 1940s, researchers seal five prison inmates in a chamber where a peculiar gas refuses to let them sleep. For the first few days, the men seem fine. By the fifth, they stop talking to one another and muttering darkly to themselves. By the ninth day, they are running around screaming non-stop. By the fifteenth, there is silence. When the chamber is opened, researchers find that the inmates have torn open one another’s flesh, and under no circumstances would they come out, preferring to break their own bones and gouge out their flesh insisting that they had to remain awake.

India has now had more than twenty-five years since its economy opened to the world to dream of a better country — where Calcutta becomes like London, Mumbai like Shanghai and Kashi like Kyoto. As things have changed for the better — you no longer have to wait, beg and bribe for a telephone, a wrist-watch or even a gas cylinder, the lal batti, that hated flashing red light of privilege on the cars of grand government officials has been thrown away, for the first time, the prime minister, president and the vice president come from families that are extremely modest (no mean feat in a country which has almost always been ruled by the monied elite), and if you are in trouble overseas, often merely tweeting straight to the minister for external affairs gets an immediate solution-driven response — the more the citizen has dared to dream.

Who knows our roads might no longer have potholes. Who knows maybe we can actually go to a police station without the fear of being molested. Who knows maybe our trains and buses will run on time.

But the rise of per capita hope, along with per capita GDP, has brought about the most evil of fight backs from an Indian elite so vicious that it would gladly slit the throat of every pensioner and child before giving an inch.

The average Indian hospital and police station remains, in essence, a coffin. You go there to die. Sometimes for the simple lack of oxygen cylinders. On one hand Indian scientists are determined to send the most efficient rockets to Mars, on the other hospitals in India, especially if they are meant for the poor, would gladly see children die than fast track payments for oxygen.

There are few civilised countries — correct that, few countries — in the world where women are treated worse than at an Indian police station (or, for that matter, an Indian street) — therefore it is unsurprising that in this country in 2017 one of the biggest movie stars is having to make a big ticket film to beg people to use toilets and treat women with respect.

The prime minister implores the idea of efficient, transparent, trustworthy interactions — the more things get digital, the safer and less discriminatory they will become. This is the only way to better India’s business climate, make the country which has often an abysmal record of honouring contracts more trustworthy, and raise its Ease of Doing Business profile. By June 2017, India might have 450 million internet users and some reports suggest that it has already surpassed the US to become the second-largest internet-using market in the world following only China.

But next door to the Indian capital, some of the most notorious and unscrupulous real estate developers could not care less. Nearly 30,000 home buyers now suspect that one of these ‘builders’, Jaypee Infratech, will never deliver their homes, nor millions of dollars collected from them, and if not returned, would essentially have been stolen. For seven years now, these middle-class dreamers have been kept awake at night — and it has not made an iota of difference to any government worthy. This company is now trying to get itself declared insolvent by a court and many of its customers believe this is happening in collusion with government authorities so that it can escape paying back this money. Asked about this, India’s ‘consumer affairs minister’, one Ram Vilas Paswan, proudly refused to take any action. That he will not be sacked will, no doubt, continue to give customers of Jaypee’s ‘Wish Town’ sleepless nights as did the company’s more than $300 million construction of a Formula One racing track — now derelict and abandoned — even as their homes remained spookily incomplete.

None of this is unique to this company or that hospital — at every level, India’s corruption oozes out like a leprous wound bubbling with filthy pus. It dirties every dream, pollutes every imagination. The old Indian elite is crawling like a street corner pee-hole with a cockroach nest full of malignant death-eaters whose venom infects every imagination so lovingly treasured by millions of ordinary Indians enthused by the rise of their country.

It is now an all-out war between Indians who want to dream the honest dream of a resurgent, re-inspired, resplendent country awakening once again to the innumerable potential of its culture and conversation, and an elite of brokers, pimps and middle-men pumping in the gases of insomnia so that ordinary citizens can never fall into restful, blessed sleep.

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