New Age Snipers
I snipe, you snipe, we
snipe, is the new slogan of Delhi elections this time around. To attack and to criticize adversely the opponent has
been the focus of all the parties. The adverse criticism is not about issues
but they are personal. In the last elections apart from interaction with voters
at a personal level on specific issues such as Lokpal Bill, anti-corruption
crusade, development, water and power tariffs and security for women, there was
the active employment of the social media to reach out to people wherever they
may be. The language was reasonably courteous seeking votes in the name of the
party, though on the open forum from the public platform, the speeches were
vitriolic, often malicious, bitterly scathing and often bordering on untruth. But
the present elections are being fiercely fought on personal issues and the
language has descended to low level acrimony and abuse. The twitters are
looking stale and uninteresting and the social media has been put to much less
use than before except to attack. “Attack, attack and attack” is the war cry
today echoing from all parties and there is no attempt to pull one’s punches -though
some inconsequential parties like the Congress only meow and are hardly heard
in the cacophony let loose by the two main contenders-BJP and AAP. These two
have raised their decibel levels to such a pitch that BJP’s CM-in-waiting has
lost her voice.( probably an euphemism for being gagged by her own party) Congress
looks forlorn after having been broomed out in the last Delhi Assembly elections.
What is more galling for the Grand Old Party is it has neither the money to
fight nor the opportunity to fight as the main contenders –the BJP and AAP-
have found it not worth wasting their time to take note of Congress and given
it a royal ignore, equivalent to the Tamil saying-“no use beating a dead snake”.
Congress is making inaudible sounds calling the two opponents –one as jingoist
indulging in vituperative rhetoric and the other as ideologically empty and
shallow. While no one listens to the pathetic pleas of the Congress, the other
two are training guns at each other, fishing for insults and innuendoes in
their verbal duel to earn cheap brownie points.
It is a pity that all
decency has been forgotten as the parties take umbrage in the saying “all is
fair in love and war; the end justifies the means”. The mudslinging is further intensified
by the media that headlines the vituperative phrases and jibes of the two contenders and engages them in churlish
TV debates– debates which are quintessentially one man’s monologue – (that of the anchor)- who subtly
brokers his allegiance to the ruling party(otherwise how can his channel get government patronage and the newspapers
run by it get government advertisements?) and cuts the opponents (read Congress, in particular) in
the middle when they raise their voices
against the establishment. I recently read a piece by a well known journalist
who does not fight shy of being an unabashed admirer of the PM and all his men (as
women in BJP are always slogging in the background unless pitchforked to speak as
the voice of RSS).Everyone of her weekly articles in a leading newspaper for
the last couple of years have lambasted the previous government for anything
and everything and it continues even after Modi had nearly fulfilled his
promise of Congress-mukht Bharat. In her weekly article last week, she tried to
defend the PM against Obama’s veiled warning on religious conversions and
intolerance saying that the present period under Modi is a far better period than
the evil period of the earlier regime despite the PM’s silence (which he has
picked up from his predecessor Manmohan Singh) and his refusal to rein in the Hindutva brigade
for its religious rants. I wonder if the writer understands the word ‘evil ’! The word is used to denote
wickedness, villainy, barbarity, sinfulness, depravity etc. Even a bitterest
critic of Manmohan Singh will hesitate to dub his government as ‘evil ’.What
was evil about ManMohan Singh’s government? Were they barbaric devils who
treated millions of Indians cruelly, tortured and killed them? In fact the two
cardinal mistakes of that government for which it was booted out were its inabilities
to shake off the corrupt coalition partners and to counter all the lies nailed
by the opponents on them. That government was deservedly hauled over the coals
for alleged scams, dwindling economy and low growth, but its worst crime was
policy paralysis that truly turned the people against it. But policy paralysis certainly is not a devilish act but an act of
cowardice and ignorance not knowing how to take a firm decision in the teeth of
the opposition that sought to find ghosts in every corner. Policy paralysis is a
result of the Hamlettian dilemma- to do or not to do when both action and
non-action was construed as corrupt. The
journalist has forgotten that she had been consistently attacking the Congress
for a couple of years-if not more- under an unwisely generous government but
not under an ‘evil ‘government. No one had ever gagged her from voicing forth
her vitriolic attacks against the government. On the other hand today very
often I am advised to see no evil, speak no evil and hear no evil and certainly this does not mean that the
government is ‘evil’.
Democracy has taken a
beating and the Delhi election is certainly not a dance of democracy, but an
inverted dance of plutocracy under the mask of commoners. The daily litany is
the claim of the modern leaders that they have all risen from poor background and
so they feel a fraternal affinity towards the poor and the deprived classes. This
is the new mantra- we are for the poor, of the poor and by the poor. All
parties with AAP in the forefront seek the votes of the vast underprivileged
and the less privileged among the middle classes using this mantra. The
elections in Delhi has brought about a deep division among the voters with the
higher and privileged classes applauding PM’s development agenda and the lower
and the least privileged classes going with AAP’s promise of “achche din” (good
times) through regularizing water and power tariffs and through empowering the
aam admi and aam aurat to fight for
their right to good living. The acrimony and bitterness between the two parties
have driven them to make personal comments that are not only unflattering but
are beyond all decency. BJP's trail of advertisements target Kejriwal in a
systematic manner caricaturing him, swearing by his kids, fooling the public
and reducing activist Anna Hazare to a garlanded photo. The personal attacks
are aimed to bring down his acceptability levels amongst the public. The AAP
had begun its campaign on reading out charges of corruption every week against
all political leaders except its own though at no point of time has it lodged
FIR against them. The shoot and scoot strategy has been perfected by AAP to
make a dent on the opposition. There is no need to speak about Congress as it
has been at the centre of attack. Its
credibility is at its lowest ebb and hence its feeble plaintive charges have no
takers. The GOP now stands for “Gone One-time Party”. It also indulges in
personal attacks on the PM for his sartorial get-up as though it is of great
significance to the voting population.
The low level attacks
and the issue =bereft campaigning is complemented by the mean attacks on the
twitter against the opponents. The twitter language is coarse, abusive and
indecent as the twitters of the day are the modern snipers who shoot individuals
from their concealed and sheltered places. Their use of language both in
English and Hindi is pathetic and woeful and the twitters show not only a
bankruptcy of thought but also a bankruptcy of expression. The modern celebration
of twitter and instant comments on the net gives the twitteratis a false image
of themselves as knowledgeable, well informed and scholarly. On the contrary
lacking in depth analysis, it shows a vapid mind. Language which is truly the
source and essence of humanizing culture ,that enables us to apprehend “noble, subtle and profound thoughts”,
to enlarge our sympathies and expand our lofty and refined feelings has now been
infected with uncouth and uncultured expression. George Steiner half a century
back in 1961 had warned: “No lie is too
gross for strenuous expression; no cruelty too abject to find apologia in the
verbiage used… Unless we can restore to the words in our newspapers, political
acts ( and now in the twitter and other social media) some measure of clarity and stringency of
meaning, our lives will draw closer to chaos. There will come to pass a new
dark age… ‘ Who knows ‘,says R.P.Blackmur. ‘it may be the next age will not express itself
in words… for the next age may not be literate in any sense we understand or
the last three hundred years understood’.” Let us not be snipers but warriors
on a battlefield (as well as on a ballotfield) where we use language
purposefully to serve as an insurance against ignorance, illiteracy and
inhumanity.
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