BRUTE POWER
PakistanPal
Verbal communication — speaking and listening — is fundamental to
being human. To do so with grace is fundamental to being civilized.
And the ability to communicate publicly and collectively is
fundamental to a democracy. Slapping, kicking and wrecking public
property are a form of communication that is less than human by all
three counts. Hence the uncouthness of the four legislators doing
precisely that in the Maharashtra assembly. They have offended against
humanity, civilization, democracy and the Constitution. The incident
affords an opportunity to reflect on the decline in India’s culture of
democracy. In their violence against a colleague for taking his oath
in Hindi instead of Marathi, the four legislators from the Maharashtra
Navnirman Sena have failed the people they represent in two ways.
First, they have projected their own and their party’s bigotry upon
the will of the people. Second, by getting themselves suspended for
four years, they have rendered their constituencies unrepresented in
the legislature for this period. They deserve worse punishment than
suspension, and no country, and no people, deserves to be led by such
leaders. Between the four of them, these men have attacked north
Indian industrial workers in Maharashtra, dug up a cricket pitch in
Mumbai to disrupt sporting ties with Pakistan, brought the city to a
standstill several times, and fought with election security personnel
over voting machines. This reduces the entire idea of democracy, of
popular representation, to a dangerous and disgraceful travesty.
The MNS, together with its ‘parent’ organization, has been running a
parallel regime in Mumbai and Maharashtra that is an obnoxious
inversion, or perversion, of democracy. Thus Mumbai’s legendary
resilience has had to be directed as much against its internal enemies
as against threats from outside the country. An old and complex nexus
of power, money, corruption and terror holds this system together and
keeps some of Mumbai’s most iconic citizens in its mercy. It is a
shame that the spirit of enterprise, openness and cosmopolitanism that
informs most Mumbaikars has to resist or ignore continually the
brutality of the MNS’s and the Shiv Sena’s regressive politics, which
presumes to act on behalf of those people whose will it oppresses and
appropriates in the name of regional allegiances.
Article Source : http://www.telegraphindia.com/1091111/jsp/opinion/story_11723348.jsp