India is plunging
headlong into a crisis of democracy as the ruling party has successfully muzzled
the voices of a lean opposition, thirty months after it had romped to the
parliament with a thundering majority.
While the original goal was to get a Congress- mukht Bharat, this has
now been expanded to Opposition- mukht Bharat as the leftists are
systematically targeted. This attack on the leftists reached a crescendo a
couple of days back when the Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju tweeted
that he had the Leftist in mind when he
said that Gurmehar Kaur’s mind (the young LSR first year student, who started a
social media campaign against the ABVP violence) had been polluted by external
forces. Rather an irresponsible statement to make without any proof by a person
holding a high and responsible office as MOS for Home. But the intention behind
such a remark is clear –it is to destroy the left and label it as
anti-national. This is a pattern that has been in evidence since Jan 2016, when
clashes started in Central University of Hyderabad between ABVP and leftists,
followed by violence in JNU, Jadhavpur university and now in Delhi university,
not to leave out FTII, IIT(Chennai) etc. What started as a clash between SC/ST
students and the administration in Hyderabad was swiftly turned into a clash of
perspectives with reference to nationalism in the ensuing debate in JNU. While
no charge has till now been filed against the wrongfully confined Kanhaiya and
his associates in JNU including Umar Khalid, the goal has been to stifle the
voices of dissent by naming the opposition anti- national. The original target
was Congress and now it is the Leftists who are labeled anti national. If the
opposition parties have been recognized as political parties and given the
right to stand for elections, if during the last seven decades these parties
have worked for and sustained a united India, if the members of these parties
are also Indians and not aliens, though their ideologies are different from right wing
ideologies, how can they be labeled anti national and therefore be banned or evicted out of the country as
some of the top ranking BJP leaders demand? How love for one’s country has
become the prerogative of one party and all others opposed to it have no love for
the country? If a young girl dreams of peace with Pakistan with no rancour or
resentment against the nation that spiked a war that took her father’s life,
should she be trolled on the social media and denounced as anti national? If
our PM breaks protocol and lands in Pakistan to hug and greet Pakistan PM on
his birthday, he is hailed as a true messiah of peace. But if a 20year old girl
who had gone through the trauma of her father’s death in an Indo-Pak war pleads
for peace that would spare many lives on both sides of the border, she is
abused and attacked as the agent of the enemy country, as a young woman with no
mind of her own, but tutored by the Leftist forces to express her abhorrence of
violence that war unleashes.
We can keep asking questions
only to hit against a wall that bounces with the terrifying words “You are anti-national”.
The Congress and the left have not learnt the lesson of not raising questions
which are deflected to raise a bogey that they are all “all (dis)honourable men(
and women)” who raise Azadi slogans not for freedom of expression, but for freedom for pro-Pakistan Kashmiri jihadis and
freedom for Maoists in Bastar. Every challenge of the opposition is turned on
its head to whip up the jingoist frenzy of people by saying that all these are
agents of our nation’s enemies. The opposition should be wary of raising
disturbing questions that will boomerang on them as though they are unpatriotic,
anti-national dividers and separatists intent
on balkanizing the nation. The opposition
has lost the battle as the shrill cry of jingoism to mask the hollowness of the
argument has reached high decibels and all corners of India. The ruling party
has a strong social media base and one has only to read Quora( a question and
answer website) to recognize the power of the ruling party. The dismal show of
the opposition has whetted the ruling party’s agenda to free Bharat from the
clutches of the opposition.
We need a strong
opposition for true and vibrant democracy to survive. The present opposition groups
seeking to forge an alliance to fight the ruling party has failed miserably
because it has missed the real target of its fight. It is naïve to forcefully contrive
unity only to oppose the ruling party. The fight is not against a party or an
individual heading the party who has a different ideology, but the fight is
against the deepening divide taking place in the country on the basis of
religion and caste; the fight is against
the mounting assault on the first principles of democracy- that requires a
strong opposition to protect the state from authoritarianism and fascism that a
single party rule will eventually lead to, the fight is against suppression of
opposition that is embedded in the cry Opposition-mukht Bharat( that earlier
read Congress-mukht Bharat and now Left-mukht Bharat); the fight is against
unjust and uneven distribution of the land’s wealth among the people of India,
the fight is against mental inertia that paralyzes our people’s thinking
outside of the blind faith and superstitions they have inherited.
The first step for the
opposition is it should not be reactive but pro active. What has happened in
the last two and a half years is there is a deliberate attempt by the ruling
party and its innumerable ginger groups to get a rise out of an act of
violence. This is known as policy of pin pricks-un coup d’e’pingle- a strategy
in which a series of petty hostile acts
is meant to provoke the opposition. It is a well deliberated
course of trivial annoyances undertaken as a part of national policy.
The opposition falls for the bait and reacts. Whether it is beef eating or
attacking and killing rationalists who tug at the blind faith and irrational superstitions
of people or aggravating violence by
accusing the dissenters as anti nationals or suppressing dissent of any kind
and asserting “my way or the highway’, the intention is to provoke the
opposition. In all these matters, the trump card is preserving ancient Indian tradition
and culture through implicit obedience to unfounded belief and illogical and
irrational practices. It is easy to strike a chord with a large majority of people
by appealing to their sense of pride in the ancient glory and wisdom of their
nation. Thus the reaction of the opposition, goes against the proud psyche of
the masses and it sounds apologetic and anti-Indian in its defence of
rationality and modernity. The opposition should start a new strategy of not being reactive, but in a
proactive avatar connect with the masses, understand empathetically their nostalgic reverence for their strong
roots in tradition and give them an alternate perspective that blends the best
of tradition with the best of modernity. The opposition till now has followed
the strategy of waiting to be provoked and then react, but it is time to act in
advance towards wakening and educating an ancient India to grow into a new age perspective.
The effort should be to inculcate the culture of today alongside the culture of
yesterday but simultaneously expose and remove the century old accretions piled
on the latter. The opposition should take into account the aspirations of the
modern generation which wears western clothes, uses cell phones, loves watching
TV serials and sports telecasts and wants
to enjoy a new life of freedom. They should be shown a new way of life that
combines their pride in their own culture and tradition with the power of
assimilating the best from the rest of the world.
The second step is not to enter into personal combat with PM who chooses
the right time to be eloquent and the right time to be silent. The opposition
is guilty of leading the nation towards autocracy by turning the fight against
one person. All the new coinages like Modinomics, Modi-isms, Modi-Gyan, Modi Governance,
Modi Budget, Modi-India have made it out that there is only one person in the government.
The opposition has fallen into the trap set by the astute Modi to make them
utter his name through personal attack and belligerence aimed at him. The
result is, his is the only name that comes into mind about the present government and people do not even know who the deputy PM
is or his ministers. The only time the other ministers are heard is when they
sing paeans of praise to the PM in defence of Modi policies. The opposition has
not learnt the lesson when to ignore and be silent, when to speak with a decisive
and devastating tone.
The opposition has to form a shadow cabinet, which, inter alia means they
swallow their ego, personal ambitions(with or without talent) to become the PM,
and chalk out a blueprint as to what it proposes to do if voted to power. There
is no need to sound like Robin Hood and make promises of bringing moon to
people’s homes or catch the thieves and distribute their unlawful, felonious hoarding among the poor
millions, but focus on three thrust areas- education, employment and environment
( this includes clean, moral, mental, physical and green environment).Step
aside all fanciful projects till such time people are well educated to value ,
appreciate and maintain new luxuries. A
country with a large number of villages-(68.84% of Indians (around 833.1 million people) live in 640,867 different
villages) can develop only if schools, hospitals and good transportation are
ensured in these villages. With a lopsided concentration on urbanization, we
give a distorted picture of the glamour of cities to villagers who leave their
roots in search of paradise in the cities. The result is overcrowding of cities
and neglect of rural areas along with neglect of agriculture, farming and craft
industries. Mechanized farms, rotation
of crops, high yielding seeds, good roads, and uninterrupted supply of water and
electricity should be given priority. Digital money can wait, but cash flow
should be there to help the villagers in bartering goods and their produces.
They should be educated about banking and then slowly moved to the next level
of digi banking. Bullet rains can wait
but passenger trains and goods trains have to provide better and cleaner
service and travel made secure.
In other words, Operation Villages
must be the slogan and not Operation Modi as
the opposition is doing now. Modi is not India and India is not Modi.
Focus on the people and that too in the villages. Let the ghar wapsi be for the villagers to return to their villages from
cities when they find villages more attractive and less polluted than the
cities. Educate a villager, you educate India.
Opposition, Unite now and strategize afresh to preserve Indian democracy.
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