JOIN USVote bank politics, coupled with a pronounced public apathy, enable our
rulers to remain in power and milk society.
Even though Indian politics can boast of rare stalwarts who have stood out for their character and integrity in the past, politics in the country today seems to have sunk to its nadir. A hard look at the realities in this field throws up a grim picture. Corruption, greed, criminality and scams have become the order of the day. Deceit and dishonesty rule the roost. Given human nature, ill-gotten wealth and unchallenged power also seed pride and pomposity.
And so, with self-aggrandisement come vainglorious self-image and conceit. No wonder we see mountainous egos pitting one against the other in this arena. Good governance and probity in public life has become secondary. Progress of the people and advancement of the country have been largely relegated to the back burner. Yet the pretence and betrayal continue unabated. How is this sustained for so long? The answer lies in covert tricks of the trade – the ruse and machinations employed over us with impunity.
Let’s look at just one example of the ploy and subterfuge that politicians have employed in the past and continue even today: Divide and rule. Pitting one citizen against the other on the grounds of religion, ethnicity or race to create vote banks, stoking religious and racial fires to whip up passions and polarise the people. It is like pitting one part of your body against another – you’ll only end up feeling split and crazed.
But all these have been tried out in politics very successfully to garner power. It’s okay if the country is split and crazed in the process, because power at any cost is the mantra. Then there is mass buying of working class votes, and muscling into weak vote banks through intimidation and threat, thus subverting democracy. Vote bank politics and a weakened democracy, coupled with short-lived public memory and a pronounced public apathy, enable our rulers to not only remain in power for long but also assure themselves complete fiefdom over the county’s wealth including our natural resources.
How do our rulers employ these divisive and subversive tools over and over again with such impunity?
It happens in this country because we the people are in deep slumber. We are physically awake, of course, but our inner self, our innate intelligence is asleep. And we don’t realise that it takes our inner intelligence, our souls if you may, to see through this chicanery. We need to realise that it helps our rulers immensely when we continue to sleepwalk through life.
Awakened masses are anathema to rulers everywhere. Because that will, first and foremost, enable us to understand the essential oneness of us all as citizens of a country. There is a power in that oneness that would be available to us if only we are willing to wake up. Sadly, so long as we deny that oneness and create fissures and polarise people we are not only losing our collective power but also denying our own human essence.
Embrace the essence
Unless we wake up to that essence, we cannot hope to bridge the yawning gap between combative polarities witnessed in our country today, and indeed in many parts of the world. Truth is, we need to embrace that essence if we hope to achieve a truly creative and uplifting synergy of the whole of our people. Essentially, this means transcending superficial differences that divide us based on race, culture, religion, beliefs, politics, and acknowledging, experiencing and honouring instead the bond that unites us all as one interdependent whole, first as citizens of a country, and then as a collective body of awakened humans.
When we remove our egos from all those areas where we have created separation between ourselves and others, when we remove the spaces we have created in our hearts between people who are different from us, we remove the gap between races, cultures and religions, and then we will begin to see a shift not only in our individual and national consciousness but also in our political arena.
More importantly, as our consciousness expands, and we wake up to the essential beingness of the human being that we are, we’ll be able to perceive the whole and relate to others in wholeness. And once we unite in wholeness, respecting the uniqueness of different people and enriching ourselves from the various perspectives they offer, we will reclaim our collective power and consequently create an abundance of awakened and constructive human resources in the country.
That also touches upon a crucial and fundamental precept: We cannot invalidate the human that we are forever. For as long as we keep doing that, we are misleading ourselves and denying our true heritage.
It is time to stop being a slave fastened to our morbidity. J Krishnamurthy constantly stressed the need for a revolution in the psyche of every human being and emphasised that such revolution cannot be brought about by any external entity, be it religious, political, or social. We can only bring about that revolution following an awakening, a shift within us; and such a shift will then have a cascading effect in all areas of our lives, wherever there’s dysfunction and disarray.
We could then defuse the acute political, religious, and ethnic tensions in our country, and indeed in our world that create rift and fuel hatred. We could then bring about changes in the dysfunction and darkness witnessed in the political arena in our country today.