Dear All,
This is very typical call by anybody who's part of our political system and nothing surprising about it...!In fact, the same sentiment was expressed by A B Bardhan during a procession at Gateway of India post 26/11 Mumbai Terror attack. Then M A Naqvi of BJP criticized that protest march as an elite class lip service and nothing deeper than that. I'm not going to technicalities of constitution and the parliamentarian politics now, as the issue they are projecting to size down is much beyond those narrow technicalities.
Though I respect the impeccable public life of Somnath Chatterjee, he along with all other politicians need to understand the pulse of the people and need to admit the fact that people reached at this point after being marginalised and pushed over long painful years of suffering..! In fact, the political class of this country have of late, hid behind the vote banks (in the name of region, religion, caste, etc.) and a common middle class who were vibrant society in the initial stages of independent India slowly turned indifferent towards the electoral politics due to predominantly two reasons...1) They felt that nothing is going to change as every one who came as new hopes took them for grand royal rides. 2) when they felt that they had been taken for ride, they looked at a constitutional provision for rejecting the entire list of candidates and realized that no such provision does exist. However, the hope resurrected when T N Seshan became CEC and brought in the provisions of his position to bring in radical changes to a system which was actually put to a slow death in the minds of the people. Hence, T N Seshan deserves a very important and immortal position in the sustenance of our democracy, whether the politicians agree or not. Unfortunately, like our society, our politicians also look at every issue with a short term vision unlike the visionary politicians of the early independence days and they were comfortable at the middle class alienation from the normal electoral process as they had to focus on those sectarian issues and influencing an illiterate, social, economical lower class was quite easy and there are time tested formulae to handle them. So middle class indifference was a blessing in disguise for every politicians to handle the system and whenever there was an awakening among this class, they mocked at them on their right to speak out as they hardly participated in the process and eventually succeeded to shut their voices. When A B Bardhan responded that the kind of politician bashing happened after 26/11 incident was dangerous to the democracy, he was 100% right! But the fact of the matter is that every colleague of him should have interrogated to find the root cause of the issue instead of not just responding at the symptom of the problem...!
No one from this political species understood that they are sitting on a boiling volcano and it can erupt at any point of time...!They were all the more interested and indulged in looting at unimaginable folds and ignored various signals this society started giving. Above all, they never sensed that this middle class is the one who actually contributed the major chunk of the taxes as most of their taxes were deducted from the source even before their earnings are paid to them. The ire of these genuine or partially genuine tax payers were growing as each scam was meted out to them and Anna's movement had provided them a perfect platform to vent their feelings and that is the success of this movement. The beauty is that it is the only movement of the recent past with complete peace and non violence!!
So anybody (I mean the entire political class) who talks about the sanctity of the constitution and the parliamentary system, I have only one answer: Had they kept up this very sanctity of the system with utmost integrity, they would not have reached this situation at all! I have few more questions to ask: 1) In the name of regions & religions and reservations & anti-reservations, when people kills people and burns public/ private properties and affect the normal public life, then it is called protests in a democracy just because it is organized by a political outfit. What's your take on this? 2) When people go for a peaceful protest fast completely legal under the constitutional provisions, that too after engaging and negotiating for months together, how can you call it as blackmailing?
Regards,
Padmanabhan Bhaskaran
Skype ID: padmanabhan.bhaskaran
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