Editorial: "We’ve dealt with boatmen, now we should deal with votemen"

By M H Ahssan

The SMSs are doing the rounds: We’ve dealt with the men who came in boats, now we should deal with the men who came in with votes; let’s hope Chidambaram can bring down terrorism the way he’s brought down the stock market.

Never before has the Indian political class as a whole been put so vehemently in the dock by the citizenry as after the Mumbai terror attack. The anger and scorn directed at our politicians is inevitable and justified; there is a profound sense of betrayal by a political leadership that, obsessed with its own survival and the perpetuation of its own agenda, seems hell-bent on delivering the rest of us into the hands of our mortal enemies through gross and criminal negligence.

The token resignation of some netas — some effected in the face of shameless reluctance to demit office — will do nothing to assuage public anger which is only too aware that those shown the door will be replaced by Box and Cox clones of the same genetic stripe: 100 per cent promise, zero per cent performance. Indeed, Politico Indicus remains unregenerate.

Snubbed by the father of the NSG commando killed in action, the Kerala CM has shown unretracted fangs by retorting that “even a dog would not have visited the Unnikrishnan house had it not been that of a martyr” (many would say it’s more the pity that it had to be the commando and not the CM who was martyred). Not to be outdone in the ‘Most Tasteless Remark of the Year’ stakes, BJP vice-president Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi has castigated women “with lipstick and powder on their face” for holding peaceful demonstrations against the signal failure of our politicians to protect citizens from terror.

Our political class as a whole is certainly condemnable: insufferably arrogant, flagrantly self-serving and utterly derelict in fulfilling its most basic duties and responsibilities to those who have voted it into existence. Which is us. And there lies the rub. In a democracy — even a deeply flawed democracy likes ours where the ballot box should be renamed the bribery box — we are as responsible for our political leaders as they are supposed to be for us — but are not, as tragic evidence only too clearly shows.

Why is it that India can produce world-class scientists, doctors, artistes, philosophers, scholars, soldiers (whose heroism all too often is sacrificed on the altar of political expediency and callousness) but a generic political class which can only be described as third-rate, if that? Could it be because while other professions demand skills and dedication that reflect what might be called our highest common denominator, the profession of politics reflects our lowest common denominator?

In a democracy, politicians are what we, the people, choose to make of them. If our politicians are corrupt and drunk on the insolence of power is it is not because, wittingly or unwittingly, we have colluded in making them what they are, first by electing them to power, and then seeking boons from them as one would from an all-powerful deity?

We are complicit in the moral destitution that infests our politics. We will vote not for the most deserving, or efficient, or honest, of candidates but for the one who, for reasons of caste or other considerations, is the most likely to grant us favours in the form of jobs, reservations, government contracts, string-pulling, out-of-turn LPG connections, attendance with much fanfare and security bandobast at our family weddings or other functions which will bestow great cachet and clout on us vis-a-vis our neighbours.

If our politicians are the parasitic monsters that we accuse them of being, it’s because we sycophants have helped to make them that way. By all means decry the ugly and unacceptable face of Indian politics. But let’s realise that it’s the same face we see in the mirror every morning.