A new-age Satyagraha

Grace has become much less common than even common sense! Indeed, rude behaviour, if that is symptomatic of a graceless society, abounds in our daily social interactions, at home, in public places, offices and finally on the streets where this can easily turn into road rage incidents which sometimes lead to violent crimes. 

Most people following politics in India today will testify to the fact that the quality of grace is becoming conspicuous by its absence in any political discourse either inside the parliament (or any other legislative bodies) or out of it (say, in TV studios of big national news channels). Political opponents are routinely seen to interrupt each other and blatantly usurp the debating space to voice one’s partisan positions.  These could be something like a speculative promise of an intangible beneficial fall out of this or that government policy as a foregone conclusion or an exactly opposite view expressing apprehension of an unmitigated disaster and a dark future guaranteed to unfold from the same policy, depending on their relative coordinates vis-à-vis the political divide.

Just look at the comments people proffer in the ubiquitous electronic space, in respect of the e-paper or ezine articles, blogs and the social media postings. The proclivity to post comments is often not commensurate with minimum required knowledge about the subject, basic civility to engage in a conversation, attitude to learn and contribute to take a discussion thread forward. On the contrary, utter arrogance and extreme and foolhardy self-righteousness often characterize such responses. The more sensitive the topic is the chances are that the author has to walk a sharper razor edge so as not to offend one side or the other and invite virulent comments. To be fair, sometimes the original blogs/postings themselves are tendentious, judgmental, make sweeping statements, and include tasteless insensitive pictures, almost as if spoiling for a fight. And the extreme sensitivity and touchiness about our opinions or beliefs on virtually any subject is legendary.

Intolerance of any view, worldview or even perception other than one’s own is often found in individual or group interactions, and this probably is pointing towards a fact that Indian society is becoming increasingly intolerant. Our prescription of economic development and the way its fall out has been managed has unleashed not only irreconcilable aspirations among various sections of the people but often an ugly conflict between simultaneously prevailing centuries as a part of this modernisation project. We are a divided, indeed, very fragmented society and have too many identities - ethnic, caste-based, religious, regional (even sub-regional), and of course political identities to defend from each other’s perceived pillory.

Just imagine, on the other hand, how different our world would have looked if we, at least the majority among us, could pause in our fast-faster-fastest track of furious one-upmanship before complete derailment and choose, individually, to be the slower coach and address each other with that famously under-used quaint Indian phrase ‘pehle aap’ ! Or perhaps could have reconsidered the strategy of withering contempt for our opponent, whatever his or her identity, in real life (or virtual) and be prepared to acknowledge the inherent ‘otherness’ as a matter of diversity of ways of life, much like the bio-diversity, to be protected and celebrated rather than being demonised, hated and demolished.

   

I wish we could, in a new form of Satyagraha, disown the inept puppeteers of our economic and political choices, manipulators of our taste, and all those who goad us in our every waking moment into frenetic competition, as if our life is but a dissipative T20 match between India and Pakistan winner taking all, for space, for the right of way, for the wherewithal for conspicuous consumption now and the security to keep doing the same in a distant future. And make these choices and respond not in anger and antipathy but in awareness of colours that the colour-blind would never see.

And persuade the stalker to take the ‘no’ for an answer, admire the candle in the wind and move on. 

(A modified and updated version of an older post of mine appearing in another blog)

Atrophy of ethical common sense - Your wrong doing versus mine

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.