Shaping India's New Destiny

Book excerpt: In this book, the author, in the backdrop of his vast and varied experience, looks at the major challenges confronting the country after about six decades of her 'tryst with destiny'. The analysis done indicates how these challenges have arisen, how deep-rooted infirmities of the Indian state and society have remained untackled, how a leadership with a great vision and will has not emerged at various levels of public life and how the current culture of superficiality has prevented the nation from perceiving the dangers that lie ahead. But the book is not restricted to analysis alone. Nor does it limit itself to viewing the fall-out of India's failed 'tryst with destiny'. It offers a new architecture for reshaping this 'destiny' and looking forward to another tryst. Shri Jagmohan, with his characteristic candour, observes: "The light of freedom about which Jawaharlal Nehru spoke so eloquently on the night of August 14-15, 1947, was too weak to pierce through the darkness created by the heaps of garbage which India had collected in her courtyards during the long period of her social and cultural degeneration."