For a month now, the Indian television audience has been forced to ride shotgun on the most ridiculous debacle to have hit the idiot box in recent times - idiots seems to be crawling out of the woodwork (and the box) and into our living rooms "24/7"; apparently, no television channel is idiot proof and worse, imbecility seems to be contagious. A word about hunger strikes/fasts unto death: in a country like ours, millions of people including infants are on imposed "fasts unto death" because their elected representatives have looted them and ensured they stay hungry without a choice - hungry for food, hungry for employment, hungry for education, hungry simply for the dignity of life. Remember, this is a country where farmers (who feed the nation) are killing themselves because they can't eat. So, really no one is impressed by a starving lunatic.
The visual media has become an addictive drug for every maverick running loose on our streets because it doesn't take much to get yourself on television and set off fiery newsroom debates that over-the-top anchors fuel rather than moderate. Inside the safe confines of a television studio, everyone is a self-styled vigilante. While it's true that in a democracy every crackpot has the right to free speech and free antics, rights are accompanied by duties and responsibilities. If it is my right to gather one lakh people in a public space and scream myself hoarse with self-righteous anger about corruption (or "graft" as it has suddenly become fashionable to call it), it is my responsibility to understand the consequences of that gathering being broken up by trigger-happy thugs in uniform.
A cross-dressing yoga guru is not a strong contender for logic or common sense, especially in a country whose national character is hysteria. Sound and fury are always more important than substance in India (proof: Bollywood); it doesn't matter what you say - it's only where, when, and how loudly you say it that counts. This pan hysteria ensures that every potentially great revolution ends up in the dustbin of tokenism in this country and therein lies the double jeopardy: Indians are used to being betrayed by our elected representatives; now, it's clear our community leaders are intellectually impoverished as well and cannot be expected to provide any semblance of leadership that can direct the citizens to engage in meaningfully powerful and positive ways with the system that we're all part of and wish to change.
Any debate about corruption, lawlessness, or administrative inefficiency cannot be solely about governance - it's equally about the governed. It is fashionable to intellectualize in television studios and living rooms about why our country has gone to hell. We haven't just gone to hell - from the debates, it's apparent we've actually refurnished hell's living room with the most outrageously ridiculous news channels starring the frenzied "I'm completely out of time" anchors who seem to genuinely believe they're saving India from Indians and can do it with aplomb within their allotted 30 to 60-minute daily prime time slots. We talk about how endemic corruption is, how it's seeped into every institution in the country; it's the one phenomenon which has not just trickled down to the masses but has virtually swept the masses on its high tide. It's a reflection of how utterly hypocritical we are as a nation.
Indian citizens are some of the most selfish citizenry in the world. Our blinkered existence doesn't stretch beyond ourselves and our immediate families. We demand that the government look after us, clean up after us, pick up after us, police us, penalize us, provide for us and our single point argument for these demands is that we pay taxes. All our duties towards our communities end with this one noble martyr-like act: we pay taxes. Paying tax allows the Indian citizen to litter at will, spit, and urinate in public spaces without the burden of cleaning up after himself, it allows him to flout traffic rules, to find loopholes in every law that is framed, use the loopholes to circumvent the law, and then preach about the ineffectiveness of implementation, to bribe public officials to curry favours, to cheat fellowmen with impunity and at will and then to pontificate on television about "the system" and "the politicians."
Look at our cities: they're constantly raped and criticised. That is the extent of our involvement with urban governance; urban citizens think it's their God-given right to pillage resources unconditionally, treat the city with contempt, disobey its rules, trample on its culture, and yet reserve the right to prosper at its cost while using all the utilities it provides: food, shelter, employment, entertainment. People who will not make the effort to take themselves to the polling booth on polling day offer the most well-formed arguments for how things should be and why; people who let their precocious 15-year-old devils drive on the roads endangering the lives of other road users and then boast to family and friends about their ward's accomplishment, offer solutions for how traffic should be managed in the city; people who enjoy an icecream and discard the holder carelessly right where they are, foam at the mouth about how our cities are huge open garbage pits and the government is not doing enough to clean them up; people who bribe contractors and city development officials to illegally encroach on more than their fair share of land, hysterically placard and picket at any attempt to enforce the law against these illegal activities. We're completely blind to ourselves.
This is where community leaders can help - in waking us up, handing us a mirror and maybe the now famous cup of tea. A community leader - whether he's a guru, a bishop, or an imam - can wield a very strongly positive influence on his followers if he commands respect within his community. It's irrelevant whether non-believers consider his causes and motivations suspect - the fact is he has influence over his believers which places a great responsibility on his shoulders. He can choose to remain non-committal and nonchalant thus encouraging his followers to do likewise or he can find ways to positively engage with the system in the path of least resistance again encouraging his followers to do likewise; obviously, the second approach is far more beneficial to society than the first but even the first is a whole lot better than the third which is to throw his hat into a circus ring encouraging tens of thousands to follow. Systems and laws cannot be changed with roadshows - they shouldn't be; an alternative that is more frightening than the status quo is not an alternative. Debates and protests are necessary in a democracy but if they're happening in front of cameras, they will never serve any purpose other than to further alienate an already alienated population who feels nothing more than a surreal disconnect from the ludicrous public slandering that passes for serious dialogue today. As long as dialogue continues to be "we the people" versus "they the government" we will never change the destiny of this nation. How many of us can honestly say that we haven't paid a single bribe in our lifetime? How then can we take up cudgels against the bribe taker? Failure to curb corruption is as much an indictment of the citizens as it is of the administration.
The concept and intent of the Jan Lokpal movement is undoubtedly noble and much needed. Public fury against corruption, however hypocritical, is real. The fury has to find legal sanction for redressal. Any vigilantism that can lead to anarchy will not only be justifiably squashed by law enforcement authorities but will also set a very dangerous precedent that may become difficult to control or regulate once set in motion. While unprovoked crackdowns on peaceful protests cannot find acceptance in a democracy, the fact remains that there are other more serious and less publicly intrusive ways of being heard apart from a show of strength on the streets. The Jan
Lokpal cause has traveled to many cities where city rallies have garnered huge public support - it has been already established beyond reasonable doubt that Indian citizens are livid with the menace of corruption and want to see laws enforced to curb it. Holding rallies and protests endlessly at different venues achieves little other than greatly inconveniencing the public making them suspect the motives of these organizers. Also, intermittent hijacking of the issue with individual agendas dilutes the larger issue of framing stricter laws and in the end nothing is achieved.
There are sane and insane voices on both sides; however, if this debate is allowed to happen through the media rather than privately between representatives of society and administration, it can never rise above the ridiculous and in the process all it will achieve is to make the Indian citizen feel doubly forsaken - by the administration as well as by his own fellowmen with whom he identifies with a greater sense of kinship. Well-meaning citizens who participated in the Jan Lokpal cause in the hope of being part of a sustainable solution, will now feel disillusioned and frustrated. Having burnt their fingers once, their support for any future movements for public change cannot be guaranteed. We are now dangerously close to reinforcing the average Indian's stoic cynicism towards any hope for better governance, better laws, or a better tomorrow.
