Today, every political party claims to be committed to building a ‘corruption-free India’. Parties promise voters that if they come to power, they will establish an India free of corruption and other vices. But are the hopes that many people have about parties that claim to provide a corrupt-free, model India realistic?
To my mind, all this is just another form of slogan politics, the politics of exploitation, which cannot produce any positive results. A clean India requires a base – that is, clean individuals. As long as individuals are corrupt, it is quite impossible to produce a clean or corruption-free society.
The way to social transformation is not through this sort of slogan activism in the political sphere. Mere change of parties or rulers will not change anything unless society is changed. And society can only be changed when the individuals that comprise it—you and I and everyone else—are transformed. First of all, you have to prepare the individuals that comprise a society.
If the members of a society are unprepared, no system that you wish to see in place is going to work. For example, if the majority of people are addicted to drinking, mere legal activism against it will be useless.
People keep talking of political, social, economic transformation or ‘revolution’ as the solution to all their ills. But hardly anyone focuses on, or wants to talk about, individual or personal transformation and awareness. They think there is no need to change themselves, that it is only others—the ‘system’ or other parties or communities—that are the cause of all their ills. All that needs to be done, they fondly imagine, is to change the ‘system’ or the ruling party or substitute one set of rulers with another. But this view is completely misplaced.
People generally blame others without engaging in any deep analysis of the roots of a problem or engaging in any introspection. It is this tendency that has created the kind of politics we see today, of everyone speaking against corruption and social evils but no one sincerely thinking of his own wrongdoings or his own contribution towards the existence of social evils.
The fact is that personal transformation is key to solving not just personal issues but also social and national-level problems. And leaders must play a leading role in this. They must begin this process by transforming their own selves and their families. The trend will then percolate down to the ‘common’ man.
An individual is the basic unit of society. If the basic unit is unprepared, you cannot make an ideal society. According to religion, an ideal society is possible in a limited sense, and not in the ideal sense, because, establishing an ideal society requires the abolition of individual freedom.
Since this is not possible, because God has given man free will, establishing an ideal society in this world is also impossible. Hence, we must start the process by focusing on the formation of ideal individuals, which requires that the focus of reform efforts must be the individual, beginning with oneself.
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