Everybody knows that two wrongs do not make it right. In other words the wrong things, say, of similar nature done by somebody else in the past cannot justify wrongs inflicted by you or me at the present time. This is an ethical common sense hard to escape for anybody. Yet in most conversations between the political adversaries in India this value is conveniently given the go by. At times it does look like a fight between children or silly ego clashes between temperamental adults. But we are talking about serious matters often involving death, destruction and destitution of a large number of poor and helpless people who are anyway living at the edge and mark their time at the mercy of the nature and some powerful men.
Whenever one side criticizes the other of some wrongdoing as of today, rest assured that swift riposte from the other side mentioning similar or related misdeeds of the critic would be invited. If my party is accused of post-Godhra state-sponsored Gujarat pogrom killing two thousand Muslims in 2002, be sure that I will put you on the mat about your party’s active role in organizing and conducting butchering and burning of three thousand Sikhs in 1984 and the government machinery, most notably the police, being complicit in allowing the carnage to happen and sabotaging the dispensation of justice over the next 30 years. If you are going to discuss Gulberg or Naroda Patiya massacre and be silent on the burning of the Sabarmati Express near Godhra that will be an one-sided talk and an indication of your lack of fairness and balanced outlook. If there are a flurry of corruption scandals, during our regime, and losses of public money due to the acts of omission and commission of some of our ministers and bureaucrats working under them, how can we let anybody (including our interlocutors) forget similar misappropriation of funds and cases of financial misdemeanor and sweetheart deals, tailor made policies to suit your crony industrialists and businessmen under your watch in different parts of the country. And so does unspool the blame game.
The amazing thing is that each party feels vindicated by the wrong doing of the other. And once the other party could be maligned with sufficiently strong coat of accusations one could feel relieved and live with one’s own share of the charge sheet. One also has to admire the elephantine memory on both sides of the political divide, helped as they are by technology and perhaps some professional support. Except that such skills are not used to accumulate statistics of hunger, malnutrition and stunted growth with equal perspicacity when the affected population live and die under our political dispensation. All our analytical acuity and statistical prowess would rather be used to prune the number of people taking their lives in our villages from the category of ‘real farmers’ having proper land deeds in their names (and not in the name of their old and infirm fathers), and not just anybody and everybody connected to agricultural activities because they have no other employment, the target being ‘zero farmer suicide’ as reported by some states.
Certain amount of self-righteousness is perhaps at the heart of any political action. But aren’t we overdoing it on all sides ? Moreover, being right should also entail not being wrong on all or most counts that we accuse our opponents about. Sadly, that happens rarely, if at all. As a result no one can occupy the moral high ground any more. If the energy expended and ingenuity marshalled in fault finding exercise directed to others, for a change, would have been redirected towards ourselves and our own decisions and actions, that in turn would have motivated us to take the corrective actions, hopefully, the initiation of the chain of blame would have been much more muted or even stalled from growing by inviting and adding to a similar chain of reverse polarity.
No comments:
Post a Comment