Let’s have elections every month, every week would be better. Because that’s the only time when our netas think of the aam aadmi, trotting out promises galore, about how they are out to “serve” us. Ha. Ha, ha again. After 60 years of electoral promises, it doesn’t even raise a laugh.
One contesting Congress neta has declared assets of Rs 16 crores, amassed by age 42, with just a degree in history. Another from the JD(S) declares Rs 15 cr, yet another Rs 30 cr. While the aam aadmi wonders where and how they made this much moolah, some cynics wonder — how come other contestants have only Rs 3.89 cr and Rs 2 cr (poor man)? Tch. Tch.
Does anyone check whether these declarations are truthful? Is there more stashed away in non-identifiable forms? The world’s second largest democracy is also going through an election process. Activists there are digging up every detail on the contestants, grilling them about phone calls made, checking for false claims, contradictions, unacceptable utterances. We haven’t begun doing the same. Despite a thriving, educated middle class rivalling the world’s best in professional competence. Why?
Once the votes are in and the seats of power grabbed, the aam admi, the ‘common man’, is tossed out of all political agendas, like used coffee cups. Otherwise would we still have 285 million below the poverty line and millions of children out of school, and 124,000 villages without electricity, after 60 years of planned development?
I have clippings from the 1990s, listing “promises” politicians made to the electorate. They make cruel reading. The Congress manifesto of 1994 promises “Zero level poverty in five years”. That was 18 years ago. The manifesto also boasts of having fulfiled its 1989 promise of “efficient and clean administration”. Today, as any aam admi dealing with various public offices will confirm, corruption is rampant, from the lowest level to the highest. I was talking to a former judge last week and got some horror stories of what is going on among our elected netas. Most of these stories don’t make it to the media. Those who expose malpractices, as whistleblowers, get threatened and victimised. If the aam admi is afraid to raise his voice, if even the police do not come to our aid, if the courts take aeons to deliver justice, if only VIPs get noticed, what kind of democracy are we, even if we do have a statutory voting procedure that we flaunt with undeserved pride?
Last week, traffic at South End circle in Bangalore was stopped because a VIP’s car with red lights whirling overhead, was approaching. That afternoon, behind the bus I was in, was an ambulance with its siren on, trying to rush a patient to hospital. Stuck in traffic the ambulance could not move at all for 20 minutes. If it were a VIP being rushed to an ICU, would that ambulance have remained stuck at the signals?
In a democracy, shouldn’t the life of the aam admi and that of a VIP have equal value? After all, they become VIPs only with our votes. Are we, the faceless masses, merely useful during election time, to get the VIPs to the gaddis of power, to be forgotten thereafter?
A former minister for civil aviation carries a loaded pistol on board and explains it away as “for self-protection”. Ordinary citizens are frisked and prohibited from carrying even cameras or cell phones, when VIPs come to public functions. It is not merely the oustees of the Narmada basin who are dispossessed, it is also the common man, the cobbler who sits mired in poverty, the pavement vendor who gets shooed away because the shopping mall is being “beautified”, and the farmer who becomes a coolie at the city railway station because his village farm no longer feeds him.
The educated middle class are also slowly being eased out of their small ancestral dwellings, either by the city corporation that hikes taxes arbitrarily or by the commercial needs of a “growing metropolis” that its administration decides needs malls and plate-glass fronted fast food joints more than safe water or safe roads or dustbins.
We vote one party out and elect another, not because the former is inefficient or the latter is better, we do it because it is the only way available to the common man to show displeasure over the way we are governed. Some don’t vote precisely for the same reason. Not one of the parties, whether right, centre or left, green or red or pink, has put the aam admi centre stage — except at election time.
Rice @ Rs 2/kg. Free colour TVs (shades of Mary Antoinette, when we don’t have safe drinking water?). I have a photo of a frenzied crowd of women with outstretched hands, trying to grab free saris distributed by a political party. Isn’t it shameful that slum women jostle for free saris, when we boast of an industrial growth rate of ‘8.27 %’ (I like that precision, as if that second decimal place makes all the difference!)
A stone’s throw from a 5-star hotel in Bangalore that charges more than hotels in Manhattan, a group of destitute children plays and lives in a junkyard among rusted reinforcement rods and garbage. Across the road is a posh golf course for the affluent. Down the road is the chief minister’s bungalow guarded by policemen, and next to it, the state guest house where bureaucrats and VIPs get subsidised breakfast.
We allocate Rs 46,994 cr, for urban transport, but nothing for a pedestrian to walk safely. As the Environment Support Group (ESG) puts it, “We have a ministry to look after forests, but none to safeguard the pedestrians and the elderly.” Those who own cars ge t flyovers built, those who sleep on the pavements get nothing. Because the poor and even the middle class do not count except at election time. ESG has a video presentation that every college should screen for its students, to create the kind of critical mass of popular sentiment that is our only hope of stemming the rot that life has become for the aam admi.
I have another ad from 2006, wherein a political party says “Commitment accomplished — Rural Life Blossoms”. Rs 444 crores, it says, have been released for rural drinking water. At villages barely an hour away from Bangalore, I see rural water taps rusted and dry, and women roaming in search of a pot of water for their daily needs. 3.20 lakh public toilets have been constructed, the “accomplishment list” boasts. How many of these are on paper, how much went into the contractors’ pockets, how much was kicked back to the authorities? This large ad also shows leaders of two parties clasping hands in glee — the two leaders fell out last year, after a bitter feud over power sharing. Power dictates all political moves, not the people’s needs.
We the people, have let politicians get away with unaccountable governance. We as educated citizens, are guilty of complacency. Is it time for us, the educated middle classes, to band together, to ensure that our voices are heard too, our basic rights to hassle-free living, and the future of our children, are safeguarded?
