It is ironical that though the Pre-Independence India was suffused with noble feelings and high ideals, the Post-Independence India has seen all moral constraints and ethical considerations being thrown on the scrap-heap.
It has become bereft of moral leadership and a steep decline in values and ideals has set in. Moral degeneration is the greatest tragedy to have befallen our society, for it has penetrated all walks of life and assumed many forms.
The temptation of newly acquired power coupled with the greed for easy money has affected even the highest echelons of all governmental organizations. Corruption has risen from the bottom to the top and percolated from the top to the bottom and thus become rampant everywhere. Today the position is that no honest person can survive in any set-up and nothing can be got done without greasing the palm of someone or the other. Materialism has gripped all classes of Indian society.
The middle classes are supposed to be the custodians of a nation’s ethos, morality and cultural heritage, but it seems that the Indian middle classes of today have been swept away by the strong winds of material lure. Wealth has become the be-all of their life and the means have been put out of the bounds of all questions of propriety and scrupulousness.
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Politics has been criminalized, the bureaucracy has become synonymous with inefficiency, red-tape and underhand dealings and the judicial institutions are the hot-beds of injustice, vice and malpractices. All government-controlled departments, organizations and institutions are the strong-holds of corruption. The police force is looked upon as an organized group of criminals and crime-abettors.
Even vigilance and anti-corruption bureaus can allegedly be bought over. We lack in individual and national character. There is no accountability, nobody is answerable to anybody. Now that corruption has been institutionalized, there is no hope for the country. Only a revolution or a miracle can regenerate the nation.