Democracy is for the people, the masses?
Yes, it is for their freedoms!
What chance is there for the freedoms of the people to reach them?
What are the stumbling blocks for the freedoms to reach them?
For them to realise the freedoms? Or the benefits of their freedoms to reach them?
We seem to be living through strange times, it seems. There are revolutions or tumults of feelings and emotions all across the world.
USA is shaken out of its pet assumptions with the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Just for a long time America assumed that EGYPT is a bulwark of stability in the Middle East. Mubarak was a dictator for a very long time, for some 30 long years. This didn’t look like a basic contradiction in Barack Obama’s world vision! Obama stood for certain values, we all assumed, right?
But then, suddenly world started to change. Tunisia started to tremble. Why even before that Sudan collapsed. It went for a partition. Now, elsewhere, even in Iran, there is a conspiracy theory making rounds. The entire Arabian Peninsula is shaking. Al Jazeera has become now a nightmare! Why, freedom! Free circulation of news and new ideas of freedoms everywhere.
Why, there is now a play of words, Tahrir square to Taianenmann square. The common link is freedom, freedoms of the people, freedom of the people.
There are tremors, dare I say, even inside India?
Yes, we have to dig deeper into our own minds and hearts and souls! Freedom is about the human dignity, our own sense of values and our own sense and understanding of what we live for, what we stand for.
Now, inside India, yes, we have a democratic polity. But that polity at the moment is drawn up by broken arguments and stands for some bogus realities.
There are corruption revelations almost every day and every day we see more stonewalling from the government.
Is this democracy; is this the sense of reality, sense of truth as week knows it?
No, it is this sense of a defiant denial in which the Dr.Singh government seems to be resorting to survive.
The truth is getting crushed by a battery of denials and legalese, unleased by a battery of lawyers who adorn the government.
The names can be taken or left at that.
These lawyers, the past and future lawyers, as felicitously described by M.J.Akbar and as personified by Kapil Sibal who denied at the beginning the complete relevance or truth of the 2G spectrum. Now everyday revelations. One revelation after another, from DB reality investment in Kalaignar TV to Sub Direct to any other investments or broker dealings in real estate arm of the Tatas and now Ratan Tata himself as revealed from his handwritten letter to DMK chief Karunanidhi himself and this has now been denied for various reasons and various versions by Tata Tele Services to the TN chief minister himself, what have we, the citizens got now?
Any truth or better revelations of true state of affairs?
No, not at all. It is more blackout of the very political atmosphere or the political environment. There are, as we are told by a media expert, some 134 TV news channels. We are well-served? No, it is another story. In TN where there are any number of TV channels, Sun alone controls, we are told, as many as 40 channels. Not one channel worth calling as news channels, it is all entertainment channels. Most of them tabloids, the very sense of decency will put you off. Such is the low-grade of its sense of vulgarity. Any decent middle class family would feel offended. Yes, the every purpose of tabloidisation of the TV channels is to offend and dumb you down.
It is with these particular brand of the TV channels competes the Kalaignar TV and also the Jaya TV. Two political rivals together have destroyed all that was best in the Dravidian culture and value systems. The hoary Dravidian tradition and culture is personified in the great Tamil sage and poet, Tiruvalluvar whose maxims, Tirukkural had sustained a culture that is universally admired. From Tamil and Sanskrit scholars alike from Max Mueller to Dr.G.U.Pope to others like the great Dr.Ananda Kumarasamy whose book of essays, Dance of Siva is another Magnum Opus?
Such is the Dravidian past. It is the present that is the bugbear of everyone, from Dr.Singh to Sonia Gandhi. Poor man and woman!
The Delhi political syndrome is such that there is no democracy whatever in the government or the party. As for Dr.Singh he failed miserably in adopting to basic norms or values. He is a Prime Minister who doesn’t open his mouth even at crucial moments. That is his trouble and severe limitations.
Sonia Gandhi has failed equally miserably in running the 125 year old party organisation and the party is now run like a closely guarded family outfit. Such a great country like India with so much diversity and regional pride every ethnic community needs soft handling. This Sonia Gandhi failed to understand. Hence the alliance, rather it is a so-called political alliance is not an alliance based on any known sense of adherence to any best practice whatever.
The DMK-Congress alliance is a rather artificial alliance. No alliance co-coordinator, no minimum programme and hence Mr.Karunanidhi, as soon as he won the election last time, with a minority vote and yet he dared to name his own son, a highly unqualified candidate, as the deputy Chief Minister and went on to silence the rest of the Congress MLAs by very dubious means.
This is all public talk in Tamil Nadu but strangely there is so much subtle suppression and creation of fear that no newspaper, TV channels report the true state of affairs.
So, democracy is suppressed in the very name of democratic freedoms!
This is the tragedy. Call it by any name. Fascism or even the CM sometimes to confuse his critics calls himself a Communist!
So, we have a very dangerous situation. So much corruption the ruling party is sitting on a heap of unearned, corrupt cash mountain to distribute and resort to vote rigging in which they are past masters!
Everybody who is anybody in the state knows this self-inflicted wound, a wound the Congress has no other option but nurse the same wound.
For how long? What is the alternative? No one knows!