It doesn’t take long for the blame game to start. It doesn’t even require a push these days. Just a gentle nudge from some TRP hungry television cameras can have us foaming at the mouth while criticizing the government. The government, as its wont in the current blasts case, will happily pass the buck onto security. The security conveniently blames the intelligence received. The intelligence then privately blames the government interference. So overall, where does the buck stop?
Maybe it is time it stopped with us? After all, we are the ones who elected the government to represent us. Yet we have a team Anna Hazare which claims to represent ‘civil society’. Who then do our elected MPs and MLAs represent? It has barely been 2 years since we elected our MPs to the Lok Sabha. Yet we now need someone else representing our true interests. Everything which our government does is looked at with a cynical if not downright mistrustful eye. With good reason perhaps. But how does that make for a healthy society?
Try raising taxes to negotiate a growing economy in an uncertain economic climate. Blasphemy. Citizens go on fast and demand black money to be brought back. Try raising petrol prices to reflect the growing oil prices. Unthinkable. The opposition will stage a walk out in protest. Try hanging someone who was responsible for attacking the very symbol of the world’s largest democracy. And we’ll have human rights activists shouting themselves hoarse. Sadder perhaps is the fact, that in all the furore over Kasab, we have completely forgotten that Afzal Guru has still not been dealt with. In fact if I am totally honest, in a few years’ time it will take me take a few seconds to even remember who Afzal Guru is.
We take pride in the fact that we are a resilient nation. 7/11, 26/11, 12/13 and now 7/13. These are just the major ones. As always, we will pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down and move on. In the future, these will just be numbers to us. They say the public has a short memory. And why not? We have a living to make. So after all the public posturing after every attack, we will go back to cutting corners on security, turn a blind eye to someone happily accepting a bribe and maybe even pay one ourselves to curry favour or to get out of potentially sticky situations. We can call it resilience. Or we can be really honest with ourselves and call it apathy. We don’t care as long as our lives and our comfort are not disrupted.
How different then, are we from the politicians we so love to despise? We may not be happy with our candidate. But will that make us vote for a highly respected but an independent political greenhorn like Meera Sanyal when she stands in the elections? Not a chance. We will stick to our party favorite seasoned old politician. Or if I continue with the Meera Sanyal example, the seasoned old politician’s son, so that family tradition is upheld. Meera Sanyal got barely 1% of the votes in that election. We give our politicians the mandate to do as they please. So then why complain when they do exactly that? We will complain about the MNS or other rabidly regional parties as being nothing more than a bunch of goons. Yet we will go ahead and vote for them and make the MNS the second largest party in Mumbai. Why? Why do we say one thing and do the exactly the opposite?
Maybe because we, the people, have a little bit of that politician we hate in every one of us. And probably that is what has brought our country to the state in which it is today. Maybe it is time to stop blaming the government for everything that is going wrong and just take a good, long, hard look at ourselves.
