Voter! Beware of cheap tactics!

VOTER! BEWARE OF CHEAP TACTICS​

The other day, I attended an engagement ceremony of my friend’s daughter. The ceremony was conducted by a Hindu-Brahmin purohit and the families performed all the rituals religiously (I don’t mean the Hindu religion). The audience was a mix of all kinds of people and there were a couple of Muslim families too. After the ceremony, the purohit was chatting with his Muslim friend very casually. On the same evening, I happened to attend another wedding reception, where the groom was a Malayali-Menon and the bride was an Iyengar bride (in fact, half Iyengar, as her parents were already a mix of Iyengar and Kannada Brahmin).

My own family has become a cocktail of various castes and communities, because many of my cousins and husband’s cousins, nieces and nephews have not stuck to our own community to get into marital relations. I am sure this distinction of religion, caste and community will totally vanish in just half a century from now!

When this is the true picture of the fragile Indian society, where people have been living in perfect harmony with various divisions based on religion, caste and community, the politicians of various ages have been cheaply using this very unity in diversity for their own benefits. I am stunned by the Varun Gandhi speech episode. I am not here to sit on judgement of whether Varun Gandhi’s claim that the CD was doctored is right or wrong. If it is doctored, then it shows the cheap tactics of some political party to malign the image of some candidate or party and win votes, little realizing what damage the CD will do to the society, while if it is not, it shows the immature and malicious ways that a candidate uses to brainwash an emotional crowd and win their votes! Both ways, some political party/person is the culprit.

On the eve of every election, we come across such incidents, where the political candidates try to prick the thin veil of communal harmony for their benefit. It is disgusting to see mature politicians, who have been in politics for ages trying these cheap tricks, knowing fully well how their heated words can drive a charged crowd crazy. No wonder Shakespeare wrote the famous Antony’s speech centuries ago. His vision is true to this day! An emotionally charged crowd can very easily be mesmerized by flowery oratory. Such a crowd hardly goes beyond the speech that they are hearing. They have no wisdom or patience to analyse what the orator is saying and whether all that he is saying is hundred percent true. And now the confusion is multiplied by the presence of a well-equipped media, which can flash the news to the whole world in a split of a second. What is offered to us as news cannot be taken as hundred percent truth, because again there are so many players in the field, who add to the confusion with their immature and hasty reporting. The best example of this is the recent incident that happened in one of the esteemed educational institutions. As the mother of a child who is an eye witness to what was happening there, I was shocked to read something so different in the newspapers!

Thus, a candidate, who wants to make a speech to a crowd, asking for their votes, has to be doubly careful in the present context. Every word that he says has to be measured, thought of properly and then only uttered. Otherwise, he tends to make a permanent damage to a fragile system that has been in existence since ages. As an individual, I have nothing against any religion, any caste or any community. I have friends and relatives from varieties of castes, creeds and communities. Birth and death cause the same kind of emotions in all families, irrespective of the caste or creed that the persons belong to. We recently mourned the death of a Christian relative and rejoiced the birth of a child to a Muslim friend. What difference that does make? When such is the case, the people should become more mature and not go by the tactics of the politicians. They have their own ways of verifying which party has the right and positive kind of agenda to pull the chariot of this vast economy forward. They better use their wisdom. Even education does not really help here.

Recently, I read about this village in some state, where the entire village has decided to boycott the elections for many years now, because they found none of the voted leaders really helped them improve. They started improving their village on their own and hence required no governance from a useless leader. Not that all these villagers were educated or literate. They are wise enough to call a spade a spade and realize what politics really means.

Thus, let us not go by any election speech or the controversies attached to these speeches and purely base our judgement on the actions of the different parties, which are available for us to see. Let us not fall into the trap that each party is laying by reminding us of our split identities and stick together as a strong nation and use our valuable votes to make real good leaders, who will see us only as Indians and concentrate on working for the welfare of all sections of the society and not just for one or two sections.


Sudha Narasimhachar