Wednesday, December 26, 2007

We The People

Narendra Modi's victory in the recent Gujarat elections shows all is not well with the polity in our country. Not because Modi was denied a visa to go to the States; nor because he perpetrated a massacre that shamed a people busy getting visas to the States; not even because his party has a program that is explicitly divisive. All is not well because we as a people have inured ourselves so much to rhetoric that we can listen without flinching to all of it as long as it is the right flavour. All is not well because we do not mind it any more - cynicism covers up as skepticism, and indifference as moderation. And, finally, all is not well because we have depoliticized ourselves to the extent that we spout rhetoric often enough without regard to the reality on the ground. 'We The People' - that powerful idea - has come home to roost but the chickens of thought are fled and what is inside seems empty.

How did this come to pass? We were political enough during the long freedom struggle. We braved the oppressor's wrong and the proud man's contumely. We wrested from an empire our political sovereignty. And, when the time came to protect it with our lives, we braved that darkest of hours in our life as a modern democracy - the Emergency. Hundreds and thousands of our youth stood up against tyranny and forsook their 'natural' occupations - as students and industrial workers, as scientists and intellectuals, to take up arms against the sea of troubles that flooded the land with its froth and slime.

They still are around - the survivors from that last great fight for democracy. And India has not stopped producing its young ones. There still is fire when the young talk - but politics has become too base to be touched by it. There still is the capacity to face problems - but political problems are too knotty to waste time on. We have other things to worry about. What were once means have now become ends. A strong economy does not feed a vibrant polity - the strong economy is an end-in-itself. It is now easy to see that growth will remove all our problems. No point asking growth towards what. No point asking growth for whom. And, if there is an attempt at all to look at what the nation is up to, it is taken in the sense of a crusade. Whither India then? Whither its people? Do we, the people, know what we, the people, should? Does it matter?