The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Monday 14 January 2013

MR. PAWAN BANSAL! TRUE ITS MOBOCRACY, BUT AT THE POLITICAL TOP

What is a mob?

A simple googling throws up these definitions:

(Noun) A large crowd of people, esp. one that is disorderly and intent on causing trouble or violence

(Verb) Crowd around (someone) in an unruly and excitable way in order to admire or attack them

Wikipedia defines it as: Mob commonly refers to a crowd of people (from Latin mobile vulgus, meaning "fickle commoners").

The online Oxford dictionary defines it as: (noun) a large crowd of people, especially one that is disorderly and intent on causing trouble or violence

Now they need to learn a lesson or two from Mr. Pawan Kumar Bansal. Did you say who this Mr. Pawan Kumar Bansal is? Okay, for the knowledge of those who have updated the above-mentioned four definitions, he is the Minister of Railways in the Indian government.

Mr. Bansal strongly believes that the huge number of the spontaneously gathered protesters during the recent two civil protest movements was mobocracy at play.

He said in an interview to a news channel that the massive protests in the aftermath of the Delhi gangrape were a mob-driven anarchy. Let’s quote a weblink report here quoting Mr. Bansal:


“Our functioning of the system gives the view that it's not democracy, but it's mobocracy. The responsibility of the people in power is to be sensitive to the aspirations of the people. But it's not necessary that when people converge on the streets, some minister should go and meet them.” **

Its true Mr. Bansal that the half-baked democracy of India acts more like a mobocracy otherwise the current political class doesn’t deserved even a single term in the office.

It’s the mob trait of not being able to take decision and deciding on the lines of caste, religion and community in recruiting the members for the state and union legislatures, a practice continued over the years, which has created an ochlocracy (the formal avatar of mobocracy) of the ruling class in India. The spirit of democracy envisioned by the Constitution framers has been corrupted by the ‘rule of the few at the political level of policymaking’; who are legitimized by the ‘exploited majority’ giving them chance to rule over. The ‘few’ rule in the name of majority and the majority is to share the blame with this ‘ruling minority’ for electing them on false pretext.

The need is to raise voice against it. And since the direct target is going to be the current political class, they will put in every effort possible to suppress the voices, even subverting the ‘meanings and definitions’, like Mr. Bansal has done.

Certainly, the first logical thing to happen to the Indian democracy in decades (after the JP’s movement), was the massive and spontaneous support to the anti-corruption movement launched by Anna Hazare. We saw the mob-trait-free mature Indian protester on the street who withdrew when the anti-corruption movement was hijacked by the vested interests. We saw his mature side when he decided not to support the agitation launched by Ramdev.

The true democrat in the Indian protester chose to take to the roads protesting the government apathy after the Delhi gangrape. This time, it was without any leader and the 30-day old movement is still ongoing.

None of the traits used to define a ‘mob’ etymologically were present in mentionable terms in these two civil protest movements.

These spontaneous civil movements are the rare un-mobbed, no-nonsense developments in the history of the Democratic Republic of India. And given the quick succession and the sustained momentum of two hugely popular and committed civil protest movements in just two years are the warning bells for the insensitive political breed of the time.

What should be more worrying for the political class is the transition, from a ‘person and issue-driven’ movement as was the case with anti-corruption movement to an ‘issue-driven-leaderless’ movement as is the case with the Delhi gangrape protests.

An insensitive and inept political class, unable to read in-between the lines and unable to understand the nuances of this maturing character of the Indian population, though in pockets at the moment but potent enough to spread throughout in the age of demographically young India connected through the new-age tools of communication, looks to retaliated when the constructive need is to ‘collaborate’.

Now, if Mr. Manmohan Singh and his many colleagues choose to label this maturing Indian population as mobs, it is nothing more but a poor attempt to cover-up their utter failure in running the government.

** Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal says India is a mobocracy, feels netas don't need to speak to protesters

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/