DailyPost 1958
TALENTLESS DEMOCRACY
Democracy is the art of making things happen the right way, for the largest number of people and necessarily to make it happen, talent would be the prime mover. The battle of UP and all that appears in the electronic, print or the social media, speaks nothing of talent being projected by any party. From the mass meetings, to road congregations and any public gathering, the talent or so to say professionals are completely missing. Are they involved in the planning? That too does not seem likely. Have we graduated from the gram panchayat types elections or do we hold the elections for the state and national level on a magnified version of the gram panchayat.
The masses cannot be elevated by the masses. If that were to happen, they could have taken care of themselves by now. Nothing would have been left to be done by the leaders. Instead of making them understand the complexities of today’s development and life, these leaders descend on the masses giving them a chance to perform the tricks of the village festival type, they also get some freebies from the parties and wine and dine till the time the party lasts. The party lasts at the very best till the end of polling. Are talented people not required in the hustle and bustle of Indian politics; the real mainstay of it after all are the elections. The only talent required in our dance of democracy are supposedly the political strategists who play into the game.
Without getting into the necessity or the lack of it by the candidates and leaders, can the manifesto which should transform into the North Star of the govt. whichever party comes to power, be created by people, who lack the modern-day talent. Don’t we need talent to interact with the modern-day world? The anathema then is when in power, courtesy the buffer called bureaucracy, they can interact with the outside talented, professional and expertise driven world, when not in power, it can only be the feudal, clannish and coterie discussions for days, months and years together. How do they keep up with the world? Then one fine day they are back in power again, fit to rule. Maybe the constitution provided us with this process, with the fond hope that there would be enough and many talented people in the political arena.
They were there when the constitution was being written. If the present-day political class were to have decades of strategy and political engagement with the colonial masters, as was the case of our pre-independence leaders, we can well imagine their fate. There was no bureaucracy then to act as crutches to come to aid in lieu of talent. Understanding the complexities and directing the execution and performance, cannot happen without talent (expertise). Where some talent is infused the first criteria is that the person should have personal and party loyalty, expertise and talent are secondary. In the very same vein, few people from the professional arena enter politics. Sooner than later, they shed their talent for political guile. Whatever the definition of talent for every field has to be for politics as well. The job description is known. Talentless democracy has its own impact on the bureaucracy, which slowly gets into the same rut, by the process called the downward filtration theory.
DOES DEMOCRACY DEBAR TALENT FROM ENTERING ITS FOLD?*
Sanjay Sahay