A revolution in India? Nah. We are like this only (including me)

With every passing day I wonder if an Egypt can ever happen in India. This question, coming from a citizen of a democratic country may sound odd. After all we do get a chance to throw out the government every five years. Or do we really? Skeptics have often rued the lack of options which rob our country of the privilege to call itself a true democracy. Without going into the complexities of political thought, democracy is essentially the rule of majority. Since coalition politics arrived in India, it has ceased to mean even that. A party that you disliked and voted against, can still come to power by joining hands with another party that you disliked and voted against. Democracy in India is simply majority arithmetic, not necessarily what is good for the country.

Has governance really reached rock bottom or is it just that I have started getting affected now? It took me 3 hours to reach office today – a distance of just over 2 kms. (Had I been a billionaire and unafraid of the law, I would have dumped my car in the middle of traffic, after having flattened its tires). Very soon the newspaper will have to dedicate a fluorescent yellow page to rapes and murders because that seems to be the only way to catch the attention of a government which surely seems to be operating from a different planet. Our jokes about inflation in Latin America are coming back to haunt us. Very soon the term Purchasing Power Parity will describe how a dollar in India is worth less than a dollar in the US of A. Of course, those who rule us can’t relate to all this. To use a mathematical similie:

Conscience:Government :: Sexy:Rakhi Sawant.

Hope I got it right and it doesn’t translate into anything stupid (such as Rakhi Sawant equals conscience and the government is sexy. Anyways, you got the point). I was never good at Maths.

I can’t blame the government for lacking conscience. The people of this country have long had a tacit understanding with the rulers – “Please rule, just don’t screw me up too badly.” It takes a lot to shake the Indian out of his comfort zone. And I mean a lot. Our “Chalta hai” (it’s ok) attitude is legendary. Originally meant to be a euphemism for ‘take it easy’ kind of approach to life, it has transformed into a ‘jugaad’ (makeshift) philosophy where we have accepted that we need to expect nothing from the government and in return the government will not come to our house to kill us. To use a businessman’s sentiment, we survive in spite of and not because of the government. We have learnt to work around it. That’s what jugaad is all about.

But the real reasons why we will never see a revolution is because as a country we are far too diverse and we have no real alternatives. On the one hand you have a horribly sycophantic party and on the other a completely visionless one, both of which have seen erosion in their support base. Throw in some odd regional troublemakers and you have a perfect situation where just stitching together a government is an achievement in itself. Unfortunately, this structural weakness is not a temporary phenomenon. It is a return to the very roots of medieval India which was characterized by numerous kingdoms, individually weak and unwilling to come together for a greater good. Regional, communal and caste aspirations ensure that there will never be a collective voice that can give birth to a mass movement. Moreover, the political discourse in India has moved so much towards ideology that governance simply doesn’t seem to an issue anymore. The BJP is a political untouchable for any party that doesn’t want the communal tag while the communist ideology is to damn anything that smells American. Somewhere along the way we have forgotten that there is still a lot of poverty to be eliminated, crime is rampant, the infrastructure is crumbling and development is increasingly being associated with urbanization, no matter how appalling the urban living conditions are.

Once again, will this country ever see a revolution? Never. I do not see a rich man and a poor man walking side by side on the street holding a banner. The poor doesn’t have time for it, the rich is too scared of the consequence. I don’t see supporters of Mulayam Singh or Laloo Prasad joining hands with BJP activists and crying slogans against the complete absence of even basic administration. Yes, what you will see is some buses torched and some shops vandalized because someone placed a garland of shoes on someone’s statue. That is where our idea of protest starts and that is where it ends.