A Midsummer Night's dream or a Midsummer Day's Reality

              A Midsummer Night’s Dream or a Midsummer Day’s Reality

The die is cast. Election dates have been notified. It is going to be a long drawn process spanning around five weeks between April 7 and May 12 with counting scheduled for May 16. Even though I have dutifully cast my vote in all the previous elections over the last five decades, I do not look forward to this year’s elections as the pre-election campaigns and media interrogation of political leaders with no holds barred presage a new and disturbing chapter in the ‘democratic’ right and fight to power. Everyday there is an election tracker and everyday there is a fresh report of alleged scam mainly to thwart any pretence of return to power by UPA, presided over by the Congress. It is as difficult to buy media orchestration about ‘scamgates ‘as it is difficult to ignore what comes home on the TV channels.

Everyone has prefigured the demise of the Congress party. Leading intellectuals have raised their voice of concern over banishing one of the two major parties to oblivion. It is disturbing because if subjective biases are eliminated and objective analysis is made, this party is a party of well educated, well informed, bright, modern and liberal individuals. They have the advantage of modern education and while the opposition laments that our universities do not measure up to the class of Cambridge and Harvard, it also mocks at these Harvard/Cambridge educated men and women who form the core of the ruling government. Their asset has been paradoxically their liability, as they are good at communicating to the educated and the informed classes and disastrous in reaching out to the vast multitude of semi educated and illiterate masses of the country. It is this communication gap that the opposition parties have seized and have filled it with quarter truths, half lies and quarter innuendoes. The media which loves to tear the reputation of anyone even remotely connected with power has played a planned and schematized role to complement the attacks of the opposition. The result is the verdict that Congress (and UPA) have done nothing for the last ten years and the country has slid down to the bottom on all fronts. A lie repeated ten times becomes the truth. Winston Churchill said: ‘A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.’

The Congress failed to counter the opposition that spared no one in the government- from the prime minister onwards to the second rung of junior ministers. The Congress has many things to showcase its achievements, but either a smug complacency or overarching confidence or intellectual arrogance or bankruptcy of articulation made it shy away from the media as well as from the general public. The top three of the party believed in silence to drown the opposition drumbeat;   as a result some of the brilliant articulators of the party were either not taken seriously or dismissed as light weight. Some of the arrogant media anchors butchered them  like lambs. But if statistical data are to be believed Congress had not been as bereft of achievements as it is made out to be. No doubt it has taken a beating on Spectrum scam, Adarsh scam and the Coal scam but what has sealed the fate of Congress is the sum total of scams orchestrated by the opposition and the media had obliterated whatever good the party had done in terms of poverty alleviation, RTI, RTE, maintaining a reasonably limited economic growth amidst global recession and increased gas price –to name a few that cannot be ignored.  Congress failed to arrest inflation that includes inflated criticism of anything and everything its government had done or attempted to do albeit unsuccessfully. The media never once highlighted the cussed obduracy of the opposition to stall all government proposals such as FDI,GST, Insurance regulatory bills, Land reform bills etc and the opposition billed it as policy paralysis. The Congress suffers from leadership vacuum because of its foolishness to rally behind the Gandhi scion. Even though Rahul has become a visible face of the party in the last few weeks, the ad nauseam criticism of Rahul by the media ‘too little, too late’ cannot be ignored. Although he remains civil and polite in his speeches and refrains from making personal attacks against political adversaries, his inexperience and his inability to spell out a new vision for India that is doable make him to be a political novice at power game lacking the shrewdness of Modi and the cunningness of Kejriwall. Had Congress projected any one of its wise men –and they have quite a number, from Chidambaram to Jairam Ramesh among the senior group and  from Scindia to Pilot to Manish Tiwari to Deoras among  the junior group-  as the PM candidate, it would not have been in such a sorry state.(even now, it is not too late to make such a pronouncement; it may be too huge and too late, to use the media’s clichéd phrase). But till then can voters trust Congress and its lamb-like scion?

The media men are the new political czars. They speak and function as Supreme Court judges without the responsibility of making informed and valued judgements. The hectoring tone they adopt especially against the ruling party borders on rudeness, incivility and insult. The anchors have nothing to lose as they arrogate to themselves the role of  watchdogs of society and in the process show to the world at large(beyond Indian boundaries) that Indian leaders and executives are corrupt, inefficient, incompetent , ineffectual, weak, bungling and slipshod in everything they do and they dont. So for the media, AAP has been a godsend because the policy of AAP is more daring than that of the rest of the opposition. AAP shoots and scoots. It does not matter whether there is any document in support of their vile charges but the policy is to splash the slush so that it sticks. In Kanti Bajpai ‘s brilliant analysis of  End of Road for Congress, he says “Media dug up the corruption, stuck it to Congress and tore into the family. First the AAP and then BJP seized the moment and succeeded brilliantly in turning people against the Grand Old Party. One of BJP’s key tactics was to paralyze Parliament with five uproarious years of hollering, stalling and shamming.” BJP has only one point agenda-to root out Congress from the face of India ( and if possible from the face of the earth). Can the voters trust a party which wants to come to power only on the slogan of annihilating a national party? It had succeeded in stalling all government bills as it believed in its divine right to rule the country. ‘ Congress shall propose and we shall dispose’ has been BJP’s main plank to rise to power. AAP wants to ride on people’s illiteracy by promising them the moon without the wherewithal to do it. Its offer of power and water subsidy, its defiance of law and order machinery, its slogan of change for the sake of change and its constant allegations against all its opponents as corrupt, dishonest and cheats helped it to strike a chord with the poor sections who do not understand the complexity of administration and who do not recognize that AAP indulges in a new form of bribery where they bribe for votes with irrational and impossible promises. Can the voters trust a party that rides on slush and dirt and fails when it has the broom in its hand? Then there is the fourth front( though this principle-less coalition calls itself as the third front) which is full of leaders with massive egos and massive hot heads.

I dread these elections as there is no party that cares for the nation. I find all the parties saying that they will give this and that but not a single party has asked what people have to do to take the nation forward? Everyone –Congress being the greatest culprit- talks about the rights to be given to the people, but no one talks about the duties of the people. If there is no bribe giver, will there be a bribe taker? If everyone of us does his/her duty, there will be no worry about inefficiency or incompetence. If every one of us is honest in our actions, there will be no fear of wrong doing. If every one of us is liberal and free from bigotry, there will be no occasion for conflict and clashes among us. If every one of us pledges to cultivate tolerance and humanity, there will be no cause to worry about subversion of cosmopolitanism and citizenship that are key to the survival of mankind.Yata Praja, thatha Raja( as is the citizen, so is the King(government)

Can right thinking people with liberal education and cultural spirit of cosmopolitanism and tolerance of diversity come together to appeal to the voters to understand their duty first before they exercise their right to vote? The famous first line of Eliot in The Wasteland  : ‘April is the cruellest month’ comes to my mind. Eliot says that a month of new life becomes a time of death. April is most often the month when Christians celebrate Easter(rise of Jesus after his crucifixion), which ties into the theme of rebirth through sacrifice. The cruelty in April lies not only in its showers (raining all the time!) but also in its generative capacity. Can we hope for a regeneration of our moral, intellectual and spiritual character starting with April and ending mid-May. Will it be a Mid-summer dream of fantasy, whimsy and imagination or will it perpetuate the joys of Midsummer, turning dreams into reality?