Random Thoughts    
Power, Pelf, Torture & Terror
– Gaurang Bhatt, MD 

Churchill who never believed in self-government for the lesser races indicted democracy as a bad form of government that was exonerated and redeemed because other forms of government were even worse. What he probably meant was that democratically elected leaders have a finite and limited tenure and they can be thrown out in the next election. This personal experience obscured the clarity of Churchill’s thought and resulted in mundane and clumsy expression.

The important fact is that the desire to become the ruling class whether by election or usurpation is almost never motivated by the ethos of public service or public good, but usually by the lust for power whose intoxication results in corruption and manipulation to perpetuate the tenure of power. The etymological derivation of gerrymandering is worth looking up. The crooked shennanigans of the Congress in Bihar in overthrowing the elected government by President's rule and the carping of the BJP against the UPA for policies consistent with their own ones shows that these are both unprincipled frauds with a lust for power and unlikely to do any significant public or national good. The recent bribery scandals of Abramoff and Indian MPs are the umpteenth recurrence of such follies over time due to the short memory and attention span of the stressed and foolish electorates. Let us analyze the two largest democracies, viz., India and America. They both have unthinking electorates, ignorant and illiterate in India and apathetic and stupid in America.

The electoral debacle in Indian national elections of the BJP is rationally justified by its right of center policy with unconcern for the economic welfare of the deprived masses who rejected its religious appeal. Thus Indians vote their stomach and have an anti-incumbent bias. The invariable corruption and stealing by the ruling party justifies the voter’s bias, but reversing choices between two corrupt factions is hardly a compliment to voter foresight or intelligence. A bigger problem in India’s case is that it meant an incompetent and intellectually handicapped foreigner married to a former leader of a nation destroying dynasty, could have become the prime minister. This is not against the Indian Constitution and to give Sonia Gandhi her due, she handled the situation smartly. Manmohan Singh serves as her puppet but is beginning to show frustration and irritation.

The Communist party support required for a ruling majority in parliament, leads to a schizoid lack of clear policy. Thus it is the desire for power and resultant riches, of the Congress seniors that deserves condemnation for re-enacting India’s tragic history of millennia of foreign domination. A prior ruling coalition of BJP was stitched together and sustained by doling out ministries to nearly hundred members.

What is even worse is the growing clout of regional political parties without a national agenda or vision. This is responsible for the widely prevalent fissiparous tendencies and balkanizing demands of parochial forces prevalent through much of India and particularly in the Northeast. It is populated by fractious minorities with linguistic, ethnic and religious differences magnified by the negligence or design of colonial and post-colonial independent national governments for nefarious self-serving purposes. Missionaries have always served as the Trojan horses of the colonizers and have left behind an exploiting wedge of divide and rule as the case histories of Ireland, Pakistan, Bangladesh, East Timor and the present unrest in Indonesia and Northeast India demonstrate.

Thus the government in India is doubly hampered by regional coalitions that constrain national progress and the bankrupt ideology of communist parties clinging to failed policies. The party publicly espouses selfless egalitarianism, while its leaders like Jyoti Basu use their economic and political clout to garner financial severance packages and open heart surgery for themselves in America. Such hypocrisy is prevalent in the religious leaders like Ayatollah Sistani, who condemn the British occupation of Shia South Iraq, while going to Britain to get their open heart surgery. The so-called moral law like prohibition in Gujarat, only serves the interests of corrupt police and politicians.

This is not a brief for moral indifference or total complacency. The legislation of morality has a dismal record of failure in human history. It is lack of opportunity and social stigma rather than legislated morality or constraints of conscience, that regulate the behavior of the majority of human beings and sensible governments should stick to these successful restraints rather than wasting time, effort and money on becoming a nanny state.

The past tyranny and discrimination against the backward classes cries out for redress, but it should be by providing them extra support like subsidized education and equal opportunity. The system of reserve quotas has outlived its useful benefits and now serves to bring the national standards down by installing inept persons in essential and powerful positions to the detriment of the nation and its welfare and progress. The schemes to extend these undeserving privileges and positions to all minorities and even into the private sector spells future disaster for the country and a Lebanon like political climate with a similar future outcome.

A better solution would be to provide free education and remedial coaching from the earliest grades to the children of the poor (below defined income levels) and allow them to compete in the colleges, administrative and foreign services. This will tend to create a level playing field without dumping down the professional and managerial cadres. The quota system promotes and perpetuates the national plague of the incompetent, overwhelmed by the opportunities of power and unconstrained by character, education, conscience, morality or responsibility. By channeling them down the path of least resistance, which is the slippery slope to the abyss of corruption, it wastes national capital, stymies progress and retards development.

– Continued 

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