On democracy and its reality.

There was a feature on a prominent news channel today about mass adulteration of milk in Mumbai. It was shown how they carefully open hundreds of milk packets and replace the milk with water. Apparently milk adulteration is a non bailable offence. I have often noticed that in such cases the media tends to concentrate on the harm caused by such ‘anti social elements’. It makes me wonder how far we would go using laws and security as solutions to problems that lie at the roots of the society. Do we ever pause to wonder how desperate a person should be to turn him to such activities? Does the Govt provide jobs or rehabilitation in such cases? Are second chances given instead of labeling them as criminals? What we do not remember is that this is an illness which strikes at the whole system. Now, we have two choices. We can take immediate steps to cure the system or we can take preventive measures. And I say both are necessary. Laws and force aren’t going to be enough to deter a person from engaging in wrongful activities in the future. It is because of some simple reasons. One, our population is becoming larger and larger. True, the growth rate is slowing down, but still it is a long way from stabilizing. There is a constant demand on the resources of the nation by the populace. Since agriculture has ceased to be a viable means of income and since globalization has given an impetus to the service sector, naturally the rural to urban immigration is more. Once the migrants reach the destination society, they exert more pressure on the framework without any scaffolding from the system. They need money. Two, global warming. Seems silly? Well, in the coming years more and more people…millions will be pushed down the gutters of poverty. The Ganga plains will dry up slowly. How will the system feed all these people? The British did nothing during the various famines India witnessed during their reign. Lakhs perished. Now, this is a democracy and millions will perish by starvation. There is nothing we can do to avoid it. We can try and postpone the catastrophe. But I doubt if we can stop it by the looks of the complete indifference of the system keepers. Three, plain apathy of this generation. The present generation which idolizes nepotism, vindicates consumerism and are products of complete brain muting hardly care what happens at the lowest rungs of the society. So what if Dalits are still made to bear inhuman torture? So what if their ACs take much more energy than fans in a climate where people are dying of heat stroke? Their lives are comfortable in the nuances of Prada, Pepsi and Twitter. 

We are at the crossroads here. And we are taking all the wrong turns. Without exception we know which ones are the right ones. But we refuse to. We know that people cannot be approached as problems that have to be solved. They have to be approached as people. The Govt says, the FICCI says that we need to build infrastructure in the Maoist controlled areas so that people can be empowered. Now the right question is why is the FICCI concerned other than to make sure ‘development’ proceeds along the lines they draw? We build bigger storage facilities, store more wheat when people are starving and instead of exporting the necessary quota, we import. The facilities will get bigger and bigger. Who benefits? I don’t know. All I know is that democracy has ceased to be democratic. It has ceased to be people centric.

Agnes Repplier once wrote ‘Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.’ How true! How sorry!