|
Editorial
Counting curses in Indian Election
times
Elections provide a unique opportunity for a playing out of
issues and ideas, of experimenting with new ways of reaching out and
mobilizing people, above all of constructing new political cultures.
But in our cover story on whether or not India's voters
really have a choice, and in our Special Report inside on the
strange mathematics of the election times and our politicians in
India, we have brought out how there really isn't much choice.
Amid all the talk in
India about vote
shares and vote banks, the growing tribe of psephologists and
political analysts remained stuck in its morbid fascination with
caste and faith community numbers, alliances, vote swings and
anti-incumbency. This might even provide some clues to how our
people are responding to and changing our politics, or failing to do
so.
But even as this matrix of diverse national and regional
issues relating to caste-based permutations and combinations
impacted different constituencies in different ways, and the Indian
TV channels and print media spend prime time and ink on Congress
versus BJP, UPA versus NDA, Left versus Congress and Sonia Gandhi
versus Lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh Yadav debates, for the Sikh
community, the issue for debate should be much different and yet
intertwined with the larger picture.
We are a minority community and many of our concerns are also
the concerns of other minorities. Many of our concerns are unique.
Unfortunately, such is the paradigm of politics in Punjab that
neither the ruling Akali Dal nor any other party seeking votes of
Punjabis in Punjab or elsewhere in the country raises these issues
beyond lip service.
If the issue of continued injustice and deliberate denial of
justice to the victims of the 1984 Sikh genocide came to the fore,
it was largely either due to the efforts of US based Diaspora of the
Sikhs or the shoe flung by a Sikh journalist. We will be doing a
great disservice to the victims if we interpret, or let it be
interpreted, that the denial of the tickets to Jagdish Tytler or
Sajjan Kumar in any way approaches any notion of justice.
Let us dewash ourselves of the notion that it is now possible
to do justice. Lives have been spent and wasted waiting for it. All
that the Indian state can do now is to bring the guilty to book and
punish them. Even this much does not seem possible. The idea of
attaining justice is funny and tragic at the same time in these
circumstances.
What these elections and the entire electioneering failed to
underline is the continuing genocide of the lives of our upcoming
generations.
Punjab is slipping
back on all social indicators. Generation after generation is being
denied the opportunities for education, healthcare.
Punjab’s entire
government-run school system is in a shambles. In the absence of any
social security network, the intensive privatisation of educational
and health facilities is claiming so many lives. So many children
are forced to drop out of school that the quality of life is at an
abysmal low. The idea of even subsistence life in villages is
becoming a dream even as the politicians shamelessly tell people
that their plans are nothing less than turning their villages into
California.
At times like this, our media keeps feeding us sad stories
like the reduction in the number of dollar billionaires. What it
does not tell us is the sharp increase in the number of slumdogs.
There are at least 836 million Indians living on less than Rs.20 a
day, as the government's own report told us in 2007. Over 200
million of those get by on less than Rs.12 daily. And those are
pre-downturn numbers, too. Maybe, we need a new Forbes 500 list -
naming the world's 500 poorest citizens. Who could beat us on that
one?
6
May 2009
|
Read Also