India passes through a new phase!
How the people and the rulers are understanding issues and challenges?
The Maharashtra inglorious episode is an aberration or a new trend? Let us hope this is just an aberration that is cut short for the common good of all the people of India and also for the wiser counsel among the leaders.
The day when the country and nation must be rejoicing on the 70th year of the Constitution day it was a sad comment when the entire Opposition boycotted the session and the august occasion was seen listening to such a discordant appeals from the top leaders that sounded so gross and so ill-timed.
What sort of nation we are building today. Do we forget the solemn pledge this country made? Do we care for the great many democratic values we have pledged to safeguard? It was really a very sad day indeed!
It was a sad day and the Constitution Day celebration day marked by great many thoughts, let out by the President and the Prime Minister to the entire legislators were so sounded discordant and the country at large thanks to the visual media spread the day must have looked more out of tune and out of context.
But what was also ironical was the very same day when the unseemly and often the most deplorable scenes were enacted by the MLAs belonging to the three main parties, namely, the NCP, Shiv Sena and the Congress, so shuffled along to different locations, was it a tragedy or comedy? They were joined together to stake claims on the formation of a new coalition government.
When such a possibility was sought to be prevented by the BJP in alliance with Ajit Pawar faction of the NCP. Pawar and his uncle, none other than the formidable Sharad Pawar was engaged to turn the tables against the BJP’s well-known tactics to install minority governments with dubious numbers in many States and also getting on with the governance norms, in fact a mockery of governance that was on such a display to the shame of all right-thinking men and women.
Unfortunately, Indian society and politics in the last 70 odd years of freedom, one has to realise, not evolved in the most enlightened Constitution norms and conventions but was ruined by a sense of vengeance or revenge and such unseemly scenes when leaders conducted themselves shamelessly in open defiance of great democratic values.
So many critical comments we heard from so many leaders. The dynastic rule was many times voiced. Ideas of dynastic rule, politics as family fiefdoms and worshipping of unworthy leaders as almost demi-goods. The unqualified persons capture power, we have seen many times in many States. But what dynastic rule has to do with the sort of government we have seen installed in the fist place. You see sloganeers with placards calling the so-called winners by all sorts of exaggerated descriptions and titles.
Of course this half-baked politics came along with some regional parties, first in the South where you had the film star politicians worshiped as demi-gods who were otherwise the most corrupt and the most unworthy of persons. Spending time in jails and also accumulating wealth through all sorts of wrong means has been held out as near unquestionable. Also, politics also had become otherwise all for another sort of butchering democracy and using large scale populist slogans and other fascist methods.
This craze hasn’t gone away still and even now we see such threats to democratic politics, though you can give legal veneers to the gross corruption and why even you can give justification to use of government machinery to cow down peoples’ voices by misuse of official machinery, police and other forces.
As The Hindu editorial (Nov.27) says one saving grace in the current episode is the Supreme Court acted with great appropriate manner, acted in the needed haste and promptness so that the usual tricks and twisted the ruling parties employ have been prevented and the honour and prestige of the Constitutional order has been restored. Of course in all this happening one leader, namely Sharad Pawar had emerged as the icon of sorts, given his long career that had seen so many setbacks.One more observation: it is talked about that the three party coalitions is a contradiction of ideologies. What ideologies.
Hindutva vs secularism? Or what?
To put things in perspective, it is a strategic coalition of parties that wanted to prevent an ideology, namely, the BJP ruling combine that resorted to a direct capture of power at once at whatever be the cost to Constitutional norms and political morality.
Power must be sought by some principles. Here in the new strategic coalition power is sought on some publically known aims and goals. Now this is an open society and also a society with all liberal values is promised and people are free to know and judge things for themselves. It is a liberal society of freedoms and not an illiberal society of fears and anxieties.
Let people decide. That is a healthy alternative.