Watching news on TV or reading the newspapers has become a very monotonous and horrific experience these days.

More often than not, you get to learn about events by which humans are being exploited both physically as well as mentally.

The “Rape”, I am referring to, is the step by step, systematic exploitation that the “Aam Aadmi” (read the middle class) of the Indian society is being subjected to by the establishment over the years.

The spheres in which the Aam Admi faces exploitation can be actually bifurcated into an acronym STEP which stands for Social, Technological, Economic and Political.

Social– From time immemorial, the social fabric of the Indian society has been ruptured by the evils of casteism, untouchability, intolerance and financial disparities, and in a bid to reduce this after independence, our founding fathers created a system of quotas and reservations.

Though, their thinking might have been right at that point of time (the reservations were strictly time bound and could not continue endlessly), the basic purpose of this has been hijacked by vested interests and petty vote bank politics.

The end result being that the disparities have increased, the reservations continue and the classes bereft of reservations feel exploited today.

Technological– “Bharat” i.e. India which once was the cradle of technological advancements in the world unfortunately ceded that space to others in the world.

To cite an example, India is today looking to the Western countries for technological help especially in the field of nuclear power.

Though, in the short run that might make sense but then why are countries like Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland themselves have banned building new power plants and are gradually phasing them out? At what cost do you really get nuclear powered electricity? Where do you dump the nuclear waste? Nobody seems to care.

Economic – This is the sphere where the “Rape” is most heinous and continues unabated. Scams galore have shaken the country and the “Aam Aadmi” has been burdened with the woes of economic mismanagement that has been perpetuated by the establishment. The CWG, 2G and Coalgate scams which constitute just the tip of the iceberg has robbed the country and its citizens while filling in the coffers of a select few.

Political – All the above exploitations cannot take place in a democracy if it does not have political patronage.

But in India, most of the so called “public servants” have become the masters and the representatives of the people and actually treat their constituencies as fiefdoms and play narrow “Vote Bank” politics at the cost of long term political progress. This lack of political will is actually the cause of all the banes that are dogging India presently.

Winston Churchill, the war time PM of Great Britain once famously said on the prospect of Indian independence that granting freedom to India would lead to a country which would be ruled by bootleggers, thieves and thugs!

How prophetic were his words? Wonder what Bhagat Singh, whose anniversary we celebrated just last week and Mahatma Gandhi and Lal Bahadur Shastri, whose anniversaries we would be celebrating this week, would have thought about India’s great STEP by step “Rape” that is being perpetuated by Indians themselves, had they been alive.

Would they (and all the glorious freedom fighters of our Independence movement) then have dedicated and sacrificed themselves for a democracy that by the day is becoming a Demo(n)cracy OR DemonCrazy, I wonder?