Thursday, June 30, 2011

Democracy minus people: and other write ups


True face of governance in Orissa

June 15 2011

Can there be anything more telling about the insensitivity and brutality of a democratically elected government which sends cops to surround villages where young children and women are lying on the ground for days together to resist forcible eviction from their land by declaring their protest “unlawful”?

Photographs of people’s protest from Jagatsinghpur in Orissa, who are resisting acquisition of their land for South Korean steel major Posco, are shocking to say the least. But that has not moved anyone.

The high-handedness of the state is evident. It wants to acquire the land no matter what. Its MoU with Posco lapsed a year ago and hence acquiring land on its behalf is wholly illegal. A PIL challenging this was filed in the high court a fortnight ago, but the court has found no time to take it up. In contrast, Allahabad high court took suo motu cognizance of newspaper reports recently to quash land acquisition by the UP government in several places.

No political party of any worth in the state, save for marginal players like the CPI and CPM, has come forward to speak for the people. The ruling BJD and other players like BJP and Congress have been know-towing with Posco for the past six years. The bureaucracy too is completely on the side of the private company. Nobody stands up for the rule of law knowing well that the action violates the Forest Rights Act and sidesteps gram panchayats’ resolutions opposing the move.

Last Sunday, three days into the desperate attempt by two thousand villagers to protect their homes and land by lying down on the ground, the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF), which granted forest clearance a month ago to make way for land acquisition, makes a ridiculous statement.

It says the state government can’t “use this clearance as a license for forcible acquisition of land”. What then the clearance was for?

The cops have been standing guard, surrounding the villages of Dhinkia pancyat for days now, waiting for the villagers to blink. Yesterday, the state government put off forcible eviction for five days in view of “raja” festival.

But how long the villagers can stand up to the state’s might is a moot question. For now, children and women are lying on the ground with men providing them food and water. The centre has provided a good example of using tear gas and police batons to forcibly throw away Baba Ramdev and his followers from the Ramlila grounds though they were holding a peaceful demonstration against corruption. They were sleeping at the time of police action.

How will the centre then stop Orissa if it were to use force in a similar fashion?

***
Why grudge 'political' protests
Handle all such protests politically

June 06 2011


Under fire from all quarters, the government's chief negotiator and HRD minister Kapil Sibal justified police action against Baba Ramdev and his followers a day after on the plea that the man in saffron had 'politicised' the issues and turned his yoga shivir into a 'political stage'.

The Congress party, which leads the coalition government, also came to the same conclusion after UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi had a brainstorming session with her 'core group' and declared that a counteroffensive would be launched against the 'political and communal forces'.

The implication is clear. Both the Congress and the government it leads see 'politicisation' of the Baba’s fight against corruption and black money as a necessary evil that has to be crushed.

But what, pray, is 'political' if the fight against corruption and black money is not? Even a layman understands that politics is something that has anything to do with running the affairs of a state and this would make the movement of Baba Ramdev and Anna Hazare eminently 'political'.

Or do the Congress and its government at the centre think that politics is the sole prerogative of the political parties that contest elections and therefore of their members who 'represent' people in our representative democratic set-up? If that be the case, why doesn't a democratically elected leader dare to lead a movement against corruption and collect a huge crowd at the Ramlila Maidan instead?

Truth be told, no politician, notwithstanding the number of elections he or she may have won, today commands the kind of credibility and following that Baba Ramdev, and Anna Hazare before him, has demonstrated, at least on the issue of corruption and black money.

The rise of Ramdev and Anna is symptomatic of a political vacuum. By undermining them both the ruling coalition is only creating more trouble for itself. It only shows that the government is insincere or worse. The crowd at the Ramlila grounds was holding a peaceful demonstration against the government’s failures and there was, therefore, little justification in using brute force of the state.

Some of the political commentators acting as self-appointed advisors of the government of the day also seem to have little understanding of democracy and politics. They think democracy for people means casting of their votes and that politics is all about what the elected representatives do.

One eminent commentator has asked Ramdev and Anna to “first prove their popularity at any election”. If election is the criteria, prime minister Manmohan Singh has no business being what he is. The only election he ever contested happened in the late 1990s and he lost. Even after being a prime minister for the second time in a row he can’t dare contest again.

So far as “poor Digvijay Singh, fighting a lonely battle in a lost cause, a forlorn, modern-day Jhansi ki Rani”, is concerned, he lost Madhya Pradesh after two consecutive terms as chief minister to a simple promise of the BJP: "bijli, sadak aur pani". If in his ten years of running the government in Madhya Pradesh he couldn’t provide the basic needs like bijli, sadak and pani to his people, what kind of battle is he capable of fighting?

Besides, this commentator has poor sense of both history and contemporary politics. The Jhansi ki Rani fought against the British colonial rule. Here, Digvijay Singh is fighting against two citizens, Anna and Ramdev, who are fighting corruption. That would make Digvijay’s fight a fight to perpetuate corruption and black money, hardly something the Jhansi ki Rani would have felt proud of.

As Anna rightly said the other day, in a democracy people are the 'king' and those running a democratic government "servants of the people". That would make Anna, Ramdev, you and me the kings, not Diggy Raja or Kapil Sibal or Manmohan Singh.

But the darbaris are hardly expected to understand the grammar of democracy.

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