THE MOB TRAIT, THE RIOTS AND THE POLITICAL AND THE RELIGIOUS MANIPULATORS (III)

And mind you this I write in the context of the middle class families. Most of them compromise daily on more than one of these five parameters to meet the ends.

Imagine the plight of the masses who live on less than $2 a day and according to the World Bank, they constitute over 60 per cent of the Indian population.

For them, none of these five parameters exist. They know just one thing that every day is a battle and they have to pass it somehow to see the next one.

Now this ‘over 60 per cent’ and the large middle class, always short of meeting expectations, have suppressed anger, on System, on them, and to for some, to some extent, on god.

They cannot complain against the System. It has become insensitive enough to listen to them. Weakened by the endless miseries of life, they dare not venture within or have forgotten that they had a conscience that, at some point of time, thought of dignified life, and so almost never think of reworking on them.

God, in such a society (that India is) is the ultimate institution where most of them go and seek some sort of solace. They complain to god about bad patches in their lives. They sometime, get angry over him. They plead with him to end the bad phase. They seek his mercy to end the bad days and bring good days. To sum it up, god is the only solution to all of their problems and the only key to the happier times.

In most of the cases, the bond is not spiritual but a need-based one where the devotee always seeks something from the giver (god) pinning all his hopes on his almighty.

This is true in the context of the majority of the Indian society because majority of the Indians are religious in nature.

And when anything negative happens to this institution of god, it provokes them to act instantly, impulsively, for they, somewhere, see their ‘institution of the last resort’ (and not faith in spiritual sense) threatened.

Religion and politics are deeply intertwined in the Indian society and so directly affect the mutual interests.

Religious and political leaders manipulate to create such situations to provoke masses of one community against the other to polarize the opinion. The sole aim is to maintain the leadership in a half-baked democracy that empowers citizens to chose leaders but at the same time, keeps them devoid of the intellectual discretion to sift good from bad; to select democrats from among the growing bunch of ‘pseudo-democrats’.

Democracy is the only option for a civilized society but it is a long term investment. 62 years of the Indian Republic has not been enough to inculcate the true spirit of democracy in the country. Its masses still act and react more like a mob than being the carriers of the democratic spirit.

The history of Indian democracy has given us some moments of relief when the voter truly used his discretionary power to bring the needed change like when he spoke against the Emergenycy; when he ousted Indira Gandhi from power; when his ‘spiral of silence’ dethroned the NDA government so unexpectedly.

But to his misery, the gain of these ‘history-making’ moments soon became history, for he chose to replace one problem with another.

Riots are still happening. Communal and sectarian tension still prevails in the society. Development politics has largely gone to a moratorium. Appeasement and polarization is the mainstay of almost every political group today.

And they are emboldened by the mob trait when we, the masses of India, supposed to use our discretionary power through our votes, act impulsively on the call of the religious and political leaders to further their agenda, and not the country’s.

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