There's no such thing as Society!

I was no great fan of Margaret Thatcher, but I agree with her views expressed sometime in the late 1980s, that I chanced upon to read. So very relevant to India which is ruled right now by the most unscrupulous, near-sighted bunch of politicians that form this unholy alliance called the UPA. But the people get the kind of rulers they deserve, I guess.

This is what Thatcher said back then:

"I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations.."

A very bold thing to say, for a Prime Minister of a country. That too for a democratically elected one. I can't imagine a single politician in India to have the guts to say something of this nature in public.

The problem with socialism, if it is not checked, is the growth of (more often than not) the apathetic, irresponsible individual. Consider this:
- A man loses his money that he unwisely, against all conventional wisdom, invested in a dubious firm. He then organizes protests, dharnas and the like along with similarly affected people demanding that the government intervene and help get the money back.
- A man takes up a dangerous assignment in a war-torn country like Afghanistan, Iraq etc., knowing fully well the risks involved. No sooner does he get abducted by militants, than do his family appeal to the government (usually with the help of a paparazzi-like media) to get him released. If he gets killed, the families even demand compensation, as if the man died serving the armed forces! And to make things worse, the government even pays them using tax-payer's money.

All too familiar happenings in this country. Of course, I do know that people do take up jobs of this nature because of they badly need the money, but why should the government (actually tax-payers!!) pay for an individual's folly?

This over-dependence on government results, like it has right now in India, in producing a "robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul" brand of politics. This, is then extended by political parties to offer free-power, free-TV sets etc., to bribe people into letting them remain in power, so they can loot more, which in turn allows them to become more powerful and these policies, till the country is run-down completely. Sort of like the Story of Ten Men....

Politicians will not change policies, only their colours to suit the circumstances, so they can survive and hold on to power. It is the people who need to take the required responsibility of running their lives (and that of their families) and let the politicians do what is expected of them in a good democracy. To govern. Take care of law and order, justice, education and healthcare. Nothing else.

Balkanization of India?

Gandhi was a remarkable man, a truly once-in-millennium human being. I say so, not because he led a successful freedom struggle against the British, but for uniting a totally disparate group of people who live in this land we call India, a land with such unparallelled diversity of cultures, customs, races, languages.

Yeah well, we have all read this in history books alright. But the above fact has never hit me as hard as it has in the recent months. Have no idea exactly why, but maybe I can blame it on a heightened level of awareness (that I hitherto did not possess) in perceiving what's going on in this country.

The concept of India as a nation cannot have happened but for Gandhi, because it must have been an audacious thought to even imagine such a diverse bunch of people could decide to be citizens of the same country! It was his legacy (and a few of his followers') that India managed to stay as one nation, although one could see cracks developing on the walls all these years.

Today, in 2008, one just has to survey the political scene in this country to see how fragmented things have become. The last decade or so, has shown that the days of the single-party rule is over and smaller and smaller groups have started wielding power. The rise of regional parties with distinctly regional interests such as the BSP, the SP, the Telugu Desam, the BJD, the PMK etc., have shown that the national identity is fast being replaced by a regional one. And the regional identities are getting smaller and smaller as has been shown by groups such as TRS in Andhra Pradesh that is demanding a separate statehood for the region.

Could this be the start of the balkanization of India? A few years earlier, I would have laughed if someone had ventured to suggest the idea that India, on the cusp of an unparalleled economic boom, faced a threat to it sovereignty. But today am not so sure. Heck, it is scary to think that this might even happen in my lifetime!

When the two of major news headlines I read today happened to be about...
a) the shameless overtures made by the UPA and the NDA to criminals and
b) the communist party's senior leader proclaiming Mayawati as a possible future PM if the UPA government falls
....I have a empty feeling in my stomach.

It is too easy to blame our politicians for the mess like so many of us do simply because we just hate being accountable. It's easier to have a bogeyman, a whipping boy, to fix the blame on and go on living our lives showing just the right amount of self-righteousness and indignation whenever it is required socially. The rot is too deep and the blame lies on all of us who have chosen to each time put self over the nation and think it is somebody else's job to govern and rule.

The wrong kind of people get to the top in politics because they are allowed to by an electorate that is either ignorant or ill-informed or selfishly-motivated and narrow-minded. When a society elects its leaders for all the wrong reasons, what hope can there be for its survival.

When there is rotting carcass for dinner, expect the vultures not butterflies.