On
a television talk show recently in which I was a participant, the
question posed was “Have opposition politicians misunderstood the nature
of lobbying?” The moderator went straight for the jugular, asking the
BJP spokesman to defend the assertion of a senior leader of his party,
who had asserted in Parliament that lobbying is illegal in India.
The
anchor said his due diligence had satisfied him that lobbying is not
illegal. Somewhat disingenuously and with the brash confidence of a man
who knows little, the BJP participant contradicted him, saying there is
no law that makes lobbying legal. To which the anchor responded: laws
make things illegal, not legal. The BJP man was having none of it. “Why
are you standing up for a corrupt company like Walmart?” he asked the
journalist. “How can the spokesman of a leading political party accuse
an international firm of corruption on prime time national TV?” I
interjected. The BJP stalwart was undeterred and continued his rant,
insisting lobbying is illegal and no different from corruption. It was
plain that he knew very little about business processes and public
policy apart from a few stray facts he may have picked up from
newspapers.
Later,
Delhi’s middle classes led by Left-leaning student unions took to the
streets to protest the rape of a woman on a bus in the capital. Their
demand was for the police chief, the chief minister and the Union home
minister to resign. Granted, the police in Delhi are not very high on
anyone’s security assurance list, and that one may have reservations
about the Congress governments in the state of Delhi and at the Centre.
But, the heinous crime was committed by violent psychopaths, like the
shooter in Newtown, Connecticut. I didn’t hear any calls for Obama’s
head or of the state governor or police chief. Crimes are mostly dealt
with in retrospect, except in the Tom Cruise sci-fi film, Minority
Report, which is about seers gifted with the ability to look into the
future and prevent crime.
Crimes
are committed the world over and sometimes law enforcement agencies are
able to anticipate and prevent them. Mostly, they simply happen and
police hunt down the perpetrators and turn them over to the criminal
justice system for prosecution and, if proved guilty, punishment.
Then
there’s the massive media hype about Narendra Modi winning a third term
in Gujarat. The truth is he won by a smaller margin than five years
ago; even his vote share has declined. Yet the talking heads and anchors
of cable television and newspaper reporters would have us believe he
will be the next prime minister of India. This is an individual who
refuses to apologise for the riots that killed thousands in Gujarat when
he was chief minister as well as home minister. While he has never been
able to shake off allegations that he connived with mass violence,
there’s no doubt he should be held responsible because he was the man in
charge.
Every
time this issue is raised in public, his supporters who are few but
loud, raise the issue of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi. Both
incidents, 18 years apart, involved a lapse of governance leading to
wanton loss of life and are condemnable. Except in the Gujarat case, the
riots were followed by the systematic boycott of victims which pushed
them into ghettos, a situation that persists to this day. Modi’s
triumphalism and communalism is shameless and unapologetic as evident by
his reference to Congress member Ahmed Patel as Ahmed mian.
A
common thread runs through these narratives: lack of reasoned
discourse. Between the media, opposition politicians and sundry
activists outraged by some atrocity or corruption, debate has
transformed into noise in which prejudice is the norm. The talking heads
of television, pundits of print and those who attend exclusive parties
in the capital, talk at each other without the slightest deference to
reality. Did Walmart bribe government officials? Was Sheila Dikshit
asleep when the heinous rape took place? Will Modi be the next prime
minister? These are the questions being debated in public. Walmart may
well have indulged in corrupt practices; there is an internal inquiry
and some executives of the company have been suspended. The Delhi chief
minister reacted with powers under her control — and that excludes the
Delhi police — by scrubbing the licence of the operator on whose bus the
woman was raped. And Modi actually lost ground in Gujarat; he still has
a brute majority but his national ambitions have dimmed.
The
Age of Unreason is upon us. People who would normally know better,
including businessmen, members of the academy, activists, journalists
and other groups which influence public opinion, seem to have lost their
bearings. Pursuing their own limited agendas, they have put a crimp on
Indian modernisation. As a concerned Indian citizen, “J’Accuse”, in the
words of French writer Emile Zola. But while Zola complained about
anti-Semitism in France, my complaint is about anti-Congressism. It
seems to me that the entire political debate in India is focused on this
grand old party. Those who hate it have forums to express themselves;
those who are voiceless seem to vote for it, even in Gujarat.
The
Age of Unreason is what 21st century’s second decade will be called in
India. Everyone shouts and postures. And judgment seems to have fled to
brutish beasts.
This article appeared in Education world magazine in January 2013 issue.
