The Protester has been named the Time Magazine's Man of The Year for 2011. He has been a vigorous figure, taking on many avatars - Libyan, Egyptian, male, female, American, student, Syrian, fighter, Indian. His causes have been varied, and do not indicate, as the mainstream vested interest owned media may have us believe, a shift of consciousness towards democracy. In fact, far from it!
The two biggest democracies, USA and India have shown remarkable anger against all that democracy has achieved for both of their people by way of accumulation of power and money in too few hands, corruption and a broad feeling of unfair treatment of the common man, but they have done that using means that are very democratic - peaceful protest. In India through the Anna Hazare led India Against Corruption movement, and in the USA, under the flagship Occupy Wall Street protests.
It is time to take stock.
Obama believes and acts in a way that is neither liberal nor pro-business, when he stands for punitive measures against companies that have sent "American" jobs abroad. Before this comical and farcical standpoint, the voting citizens of the USA wanted "change" and "hope" when they voted for him. They got change indeed, but they were too immature to realize much of that change would involve people losing their homes, jobs, and the nation its credit rating. Now they are beginning to lose hope, as there seems to be no panacea in sight. And yet, it is not Obama's failure. It is the failure of American people to understand that constant addiction to debt is not a good thing.
Faced with massive charges of corruption and inefficiency, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his coterie are making noises about "India Inc." using negative language against their government, Kapil Sibal wants to police the internet, and journalists have been shot dead, not to speak of Right To Information activists too, that are constantly under threat. In the same period that the Lokpal Bill has been a much touted solution to India's vast corruption endemic, there has been no significant increase in the number of Indian citizens using the existing channels to complain against corruption. In other words, Indian citizens are yet to understand that the Lokpal bill is just another tool, and is not a solution against corruption if we are not willing to use whatever means exist.
In both cases, it is a failure of the people, by the people, and nothing is going to happen for the people, unless we lose our illusions.
American companies will, when threatened by government to function in a certain way inimical to their interests, ship their entire companies abroad in order to be profitable. That is how professionally capitalistic they are. Indian people will, under the slightest pressure, prefer to pay a bribe and escape the hazards of legal process to get the simplest things done. Both are choices, and both are driven by selfishness. Both are also driven by human nature. Under pressure, we do not care about the collective. We are as much driven by the survival of the fittest as any other species. Democracy is about the collective, while survival is about the individual. Herein lies the fundamental unviability of democracy as a system for all conditions.
Capitalism always tries to protect its investments. Capitalism has invested in democracy - not in the egalitarian, flawed but noble idea of a government of the people, for the people and by the people, but in the inevitable and always available side effects of apathy, ignorance, and gullibility. It is very easy to lie to people who are under such massive doses of illusion. Both Indians and Americans are prime candidates for ignorance related diseases. Every instance of corruption and looting of public wealth in both nations has taken place with impunity, purely because the threat to the common individual was always maintained at a level less than critical.
As long as the individual living in a democracy is given the opportunity to earn for himself food, water and shelter, however shallow and unfair that "opportunity" may be, and as long as there are visible examples of other individuals successfully making use of such opportunity, the urge for mutiny can be largely suppressed. Apart from the activists who will take great offence to corrupt practices that threaten any public asset, the rest are just sheep. And sheep are very valuable commodities to both democracy and capitalism. How else can we be sold medicines we do not need, luxuries that are highly damaging to the environment, and ideas that can keep us lazy and rich forever, without any fundamental base of truth?
If a top sportsperson "endorses" a health drink, it is perfectly legal even if that person never tasted it for most of his or her life. This level of lying is acceptable as an integral part of the instrumentation of capitalism. It is also perfectly acceptable for the government to tell us partial truths about deals, conceal information about certain deals which might cause us to suspect the integrity of the people in charge, or cause them to become unpopular. Case in point - Put money in a bank, and you have the right to monitor your money at any point in time. Pay taxes and after that you cannot monitor how the government spends your money!
Time bound action - if you pay tax this year, why can't you get the services you paid for within a reasonable time frame? Why can't the relationship between government, the institution and the individual be based on some kind of fairness, if indeed democracy is at the most basic, a way of providing the needy with essential protection of the collective? All of us pay the same amount of road tax based on some percentage cost of the vehicles we own. But some of us live in areas with terrible roads and some in areas with excellent roads. Why this disparity? In fact, the government provides no extra compensation for those of us suffering more repair costs due to bad roads.
If this can be forgiven, because of the inherent inability of the government to provide equitable treatment to all citizens, why can't a tax payer who is late on his payment be forgiven for a business deal that went less favourably than expected for him? There has never been equitable respect between individual and the institution. In other words, democratic governments have regularly breached the trust of the voting citizens and done so with impunity and indeed indemnity. We cannot sue the government for non-performance! Something we can take even a business to court for!
It is on this fundamentally one-sided and anti-citizen platform that the dressing up of democracy takes place - to show the complete opposite. This dressing is called "rights". We have the right to expression, peaceful protest and due course of law. Expression that can be suppressed, peaceful protest up until the point when the government decides to remove protesters, and due course of law that usually means many years for justice to be delivered. Injustice, delayed justice, inefficiency, corruption and inaction are all forms of terrorism against people. None of us are terrorized by the possibility of a few bombs going off here and there. We are concerned, but the thought does not occupy our mind. But we are necessarily terrorized, certainly in India, by having to ask the government to perform efficienty and cleanly. In fact, we go as far as we can afford, to avoid going through the arduous, treacherous and slow path of getting anything done legally, because we are terrorized by delays, inaction, inefficiency and indifference - all of which any government office can supply in abundance.
None of our fundamental and constitutional rights can do anything against inefficiency. The government can always sit behind the wall of inefficiency and mock and laugh at all the rights we have. Therefore, in order to get the government to perform outside that wall of inefficiency, we are forced to resort to methods that are less than peaceful, attract embarrassing levels of attention, and with the support of the media, which in itself is a corrupt and biased entity. Whenever the pressure gets too high to ignore, the government comes up with release valves in the forms of employment schemes, poverty alleviation measures, and grievance redressal camps. Once the immediate pressure is released, protesters who are nothing but pawns, simply retreat to their normal lives with a sense of having accomplished something. This is how democracies without consciousness are bound to perform.
India is a shining example in every sphere, of progress through competence without consciousness. We are even being told through a very insulting advertisement for Coca Cola that while some are ignoring the environment, there are millions of trees being planted every day, and while some fight over petty things, millions drink Coca Cola, therefore we should all drink the damn thing and be happy, instead of feeling negative! This is the most insulting kind of association therapy we should be subjected to.
No doubt some advertising genius wanted to tie in our readiness to accept any good news to the undeniable "goodness" of this nectar from heaven, and immediately, POW! Who do we hit? The hapless millions who have already been softened by a thousand problems, so that something like this could get under our skin and create this illusion, through images of cute children of course, that Coca Cola is an essentially good thing. It fucking well isn't. It's poisonous and has been banned from millions of school campuses in its country of origin. That's the damn truth.
The government creates exactly this kind of illusion to give us a feeling of power, of purpose, of individual invincibility, giving us the feeling that each one of us counts! Yes, we do count, but only how much we earn! The government can simply tax what we earn, and siphon it to its own cockroaches, to various invisible places, and deny us the goods and services we paid for. But while we can get mad at a shopkeeper for selling us substandard goods or services, we cannot question the government for wasting the wealth we generously donate year after year.
If the government can do this under the umbrella of inefficiency and deception, why can't we do it under the umbrella of cleverness and sheer practicality? This is the exchange and the unspoken relationship between citizen and a democratic government. Indians woke up to this a long time ago, but the Americans still live under some idealistic notions of democracy. As far as India is concerned, it suits both perfectly - we don't mind being corrupt to further our individual causes, and the government can tolerate us as long as we throw in enough to keep its babus paid, and the looters at the top happy. The illusion works!
What the heck, if anything, is right with this system? Nothing gets delivered, in quality or quantity, as promised. There are so many cases in the NREGA where the workers have received only Re.1 to Rs.11 out of the Rs.100 the scheme promises. To start with, this NREGA scheme is fraught with pretense. The physical work involved is so menial and so farcical, that farmers and agriculturists have lost a great deal of manpower to this useless exercise in alleviating poverty. What this scheme has done is provide free money and foster laziness, thereby driving up the prices for manual labour in agriculture through scarcity, endanger the future of India's agricultural production, and create a whole new culture of unproductive money distribution. In fact, it is rampant lining of the pockets of all the middlemen involved in this scheme. Anytime cash is there to be distributed, it will not reach our common (m)asses. Only the most distilled morons will ever believe otherwise. But it is perfectly democratic to keep coming up with hare brained ideas that go nowhere, just to keep the pressure simmering below boiling point.
The rich-poor divide can only widen, and since India's poor are massive in number, it won't take long for this group to turn violent, for two reasons. Firstly, the feeling of disenfranchisement which political oppositions will play up on, and dumb masses will immediately subscribe to as being something "they" did, and secondly because of the very famously Indian habit of forming mobs at the slightest provocation. It is not surprising that there are so many armed militant groups in India, seemingly all of a sudden, and while we choose not to talk about them, or their grievances, it is not hard to see where it all comes from - the non functioning of democratic ideas and principles, and an utter failure to rule ourselves in the collective.
The fundamental truth is that democracy is about the collective, while survival is about the individual. When survival is in question, damn the collective. Without fairly high levels of material well being and education, democracy cannot function. No human being is going to give up individual interests for the collective, except in extreme acts of sacrifice.
This is where the other great illusion that democracy fosters has the chance to step in - equality. This is the most corrupt word in the vocabulary of politics. It is the greatest lie, and the most impossible ambition. "All citizens are equal". What can be more tragically wrong than this, when everything is geared to test who is the best?
All the driving forces of growth depend on commerce, and with profit being a motive, competition is automatic. Competition is all about inequality. We Indians actively encourage competition, and while we do not give a rat's bottom about India being ranked 119 in the Human Development Index, we definitely push our children to get the "top" rank, get the "top" education, and go for the "top" job. Are we to believe that a child going to a rural government school has any chance of being equal to his counterpart going to a modern, privately run city school? Is there any realistic chance that the two will get to make any sort of equal contribution to society when they grow up?
What else but a sense of deprivation can creep into those classes of society not having any realistic chance to accrue wealth? What options are open to them? Can they give up their way of life and suddenly slip into the so called mainstream? Absolutely not. This class of people by the way, is often the voting class, and their votes are precious, but their lives are not. If they become part of the middle class, then they would not vote either. So, there is clearly every motivation for our political parties to keep the poor poor, and the rich out of the way of any uncomfortable questions.
All the periods of India's glory have been under a benevolent dictatorship - thousands of years of peace, prosperity and pride - or so our history tells us. We have always been led by a king in those wonderful times. Even the BJP, a prominent political party now, talks of Rama Rajya - glory be to Ram, a king, not an elected leader! So, why're we so dumb as to subscribe to this untenable idea of democracy?
Truth is, we were sold this idea by the eminent morons of the time. Not people who were equal to us, but people who knew we would fall in line like sheep. We did and we bleated together, in one voice - "Of the people, for the people, by the people"! Sure, but which people?
Now, it is time to think.
- BSK.
