How Real is the Vision?

The dictionary meaning of ‘‘vision’’ is (1) the faculty or state of being able to see, (2) the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom, or (3) an experience of seeing something in a dream or trance, or as a supernatural apparition. Now that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has unveiled the Vision 2020 document for the development of the Northeast and that Asom Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi too has finalized the State version of that vision, it is imperative that we analyse such visions in the backdrop of the harsh realities confronting the region, especially Asom. We must ask questions in relation to the implementation part of the vision documents, not what and how the authors wrote them. For, the writing business is over and surely cannot be greater than implementation of what has been penned down in beautiful words. Will these vision documents reflect on the government’s ‘‘faculty or state of being able to see’’ the reality or ‘‘the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom’’? Or will the vision documents just remain an ‘‘experience of seeing something in a dream or trance’’? The other day, DoNER Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar was telling a local television channel that times had changed in the Northeast, the scale of violence had gone down remarkably, and Asom to the extent of 90 per cent was peaceful. If this is not trance, what else is? The minister should spend some days in Nagaland (where there are now three different factions of the NSCN and where fratricidal killings have become the order of the day), Manipur (home to the largest number of militant outfits in the Northeast) and Asom (where only two companies of an ULFA battalion have announced truce while the top leaders of the outfit, based in Bangladesh, are unrepentant about the butchery of even children in the name of ‘revolution’).Releasing the Vision 2020 document for the northeastern region in New Delhi on Wednesday, the Prime Minister said: ‘‘Let development be the leitmotif of the northeastern region... Violence has no place in our society and our culture.’’ This is so very true, but only on paper. The Prime Minister should rather ponder: Will the politicians of the region ever allow development to be the leitmotif of their homeland? How many of the political executives of the region are not corrupt? Asom’s case is interesting. A very reliable corruption report has branded Asom the most corrupt State in the country, and yet the Chief Minister of the State has remained unruffled and rather tried to rubbish it. He has talked of a higher growth rate of the State as a counter to the report — as if the ‘growth’ alone should prompt us to overlook or even accept the alarming corruption index. This attitude says so many things. Indeed, such attitude points to the kind of ‘vision’ that our chief political executive has towards the making of a ‘developed’ State.The script of any vision document charms one and all. In fact one of the unstated objectives of vision documents to be implemented by an incompetent but competitively corrupt political class is to charm the greatest number of voters and make them live in a dream or trance, which is also a meaning of vision. The people should ask: Given the vision document for the Northeast, as also the one prepared by the Gogoi government for the State, where is the visionary to convert the vision into reality? Where is the leader to lead that vision and hence lead the people? And how meaningful will any vision be for the people of Asom when they know that illegal Bangladeshis, as Indian ‘minorities’, will soon outnumber and persecute them? Only documents of vision will not do. source: sentinel assam editorila 04.07.08