DailyPost 1652
DEBASED POLITICAL DISCOURSE
An accident, an injury, foul language, slanderous proclamations, contesting on a second seat, declaring landslide victory way before the counting, playing mind games, using multimedia to create campaigns bereft of facts is where electioneering has come down to. Beyond that are the false and inflated egos, fake claims and outlandish promises. When the politicians talk of taking their report card to the people every five years and the electorate validating it or otherwise, where is the report card in the first place. What are the data points / marks on the report card and on what parameters, the evaluation mechanism and the grading of the performance. A very doable evaluation mechanism, it will never be allowed to happen.
The morning shows the day, the political election discourse has been debased to a level, that the ensuing governance can be seen with the utmost clarity. The connect between electioneering and governance has never been researched upon, but that is the connect which has completely gone awry. That is the curse of Indian democracy. The Political Manifestos are forgotten as soon as they are released. In the whole campaign what are covered are the slinging matches and not the political manifestoes. The confirmation of one nonsense after the other is done in public meetings by a yes or no.
The electorate is nowhere in the picture. They never were. In a completely debased political discourse, they have also lost the track. Super doses of dopamine are injected in them, so that they remain happy forever. That every vote counts, your vote can decide a nation’s fate, that it is sacrilegious not to vote and none of these have ever yielded fruits, has been a proven reality gaping at us. In an effort to show the electorate at a much higher pedestal, they are offered homilies of maturity of a kind, which does not exist. Otherwise, this variant of political class wouldn’t have ever been born. One example to prove their maturity has been their voting differently for the Lok Sabha and Vidhana Sabha polls.
The assembly and parliament sessions are another example of the debased political discourse. Sometimes it goes beyond this and descends into a outright physical fight. How much of it gets connected to the masses in real terms? The solidification of political parties beyond good and bad and remaining united for their own good and not the nation’s cause is the true debasement of Indian democracy. Are the present day election campaigns and the debased political discourse real threats to our democracy? We can see the inklings of a bigger damage already.
*DEBASED POLITICAL DISCOURSE AND VIBRANT & ROBUST DEMOCRACY AND ANTITHETICAL.