The last five years have been epochal to my thought processes. I would have liked to imagine myself as a thinking person, but the last few years made me rethink if thought processes were water-tight compartments and if I ought to align myself to any. I had to Google and find what right wing and left wing meant and ponder where I actually fit [better]. Suddenly I realised that that world has been torn asunder by these political thought processes and we are ever tossed about between these two ideologies.
Some time ago, I listened to a few talks on the resurgence of the right wing. One of the reasons espoused was that the elitist of the left felt it condescending to engage with the common people whose sentiments the right-wing politicians were successful enough in whipping up and have consequently won one election after another in different parts of the world. If the left weren’t acting like these self-appointed sanctimonious pricks, we would not be in this situation to start with, they opined.
Meanwhile, why don’t we discuss these things more often? Our WhatsApp groups are often sanitized with ground rules not to discuss politics. But then, one friend interjected, "Why not"? Politics now affects the way we dress, eat, walk and talk. If we are not informed and discuss it enough, politicians like to revel in this disinformation and discontentment which finds no way out. What we have lost in this divergence of the two worlds is the appreciation of the other side. We have lost the ability to see an opinion as divorced from the front that is propounding it. Hence, attacks become personal and then the scene gets ugly.
Today if I agree or disagree with a government programme I have to proclaim a disclaimer if I belong to the Congress or the BJP or none - so as to be treated accordingly. While the government of the day seems to have gone overboard and branded every criticism as ‘anti-national’, mature, non-partisan praise of the initiatives taken by the government have also become rare. I do not like this government’s obsession with the cow, but I do believe that the Swacch Bharat Mission is a good ideal. A few years ago, a sentence like this would have been considered normal. But now the fractured society does not want either part of the sentence to be in the same sentence. That is the really sorry state of our times.
This is what we need to break. Friends of the BJP would like to believe that India was born in May 2014. This country was NOTHING before that day and everything that it is today is because of the last 5 years, they reiterate. At the least, educated people should not fall for this. Even, by 2014 India was already a growing superpower, with its IITs and IIMs, with landmark acts like the NREGA, RTE and RTI. Could they have done better? Of course. Did the Congress capitalise on the many decades of absolute no-opposition, in building a country that is not corrupt? No. By the end of 2014, they did become a gigantic, colossal, epitome of ineptitude. But, has the BJP capitalised on its unimagined overwhelming majority and windfall in crude oil prices? No. Do I believe the Congress to be the only alternative to BJP and vice-versa? No. We need to rise above these compartmentalised thinking – if we need better solutions to our age-old problems.
