Democracy – Blackmail, are they synonyms ?

At our homes, institutions and offices we come across people, whose opinion we don’t agree with, whose behaviour offends us, whose thought process is in complete disagreement with ours, what do we do? We learn to live with it, we compromise, and we adjust as that is what is expected from mature professional individuals.

But if that issue has nothing to do with us it is much easier to bring about a significant change. Suppose you don’t like a book then just gather a few friends, along with a few uneducated, easy to hire “professionals” and you have a mob. About 20 to 40 individuals are enough to fill, indeed overflow, the camera lens frame of those rapidly growing news channel. Believe me that 20 people group, depending on the energy levels, can be presented as a big mob on the 21’ TV screen. The video footage would be more than sufficient to ban the book in that particular state/town, and if you manage to keep your team motivated just long enough to allow one of those big national news channels to arrive at the live scene then the desired result could be replicated on bookstores across the whole nation. Better still if you hire some real good professionals, within that mob of yours, and they manage to set ablaze a vehicle or two, preferably one of those 24 x 7 parked roadways bus, then you can be rest assured that you have done enough to force that writer into exile.

The same effect could be replicated against paintings, movies, photographs or any other object against which you have any form of prejudice. You just need to have enough spare time and financial resources, rest our complex democratic system takes care of. The moment the mob is captured on the new channels, it is associated with a particular religion/caste, and then we have one or more of those political parties which has always pretended to be the voice of that section of the society, or in simple words has had a strong hold over that particular votebank. The results could be even sweeter if this particular party that we are talking about is currently in opposition, in that scenario they would make sure that they leave no stone unturned to bring you to the frontages of every leading daily. What if you make the fatal error of manufacturing a mob with different religious and caste identities, better still, the mob is backed by the entire opposition in unison. And the government is attacked on bigger ground like “morality”, “insensitivity”, “law and order chaos” and an emergency is requested. Once an emergency is requested it just boils down to the fact whether the governor was appointed by “Sonia ji” or not.

We know this is not the right course. Powerful media, a fruit of liberalization, threatens this very liberalization. We cannot blame the media channels after all they are governed by mere commercial interests. What needs to change is this politics of castes and religion, its time to welcome politics of agendas and ideologies. Effective Governance is about conceptualising and executing plans for macro level social and economic welfare, it is not about appeasing each and every component of the society. This politics of appeasement would if not reverse, incredibly slow down the pace of the desired transformations. We Indians would not like to earn the distinction of redefining Democracy as the Government of the people, for the people, and “blackmailed” by the people.

 

 

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