In times of stress, it relaxes the muscles and de-clutters the mind to look elsewhere. So, Hamlet comes to mind. His soliloquy, ‘To be, nor not to be…’ haunts me these days.
When anything haunts you, the best you can do for yourself is to modify it. That is the academic’s version of exorcism. I was an academic as well as a priest. So, exorcism of both kinds lurks hypodermic in me.
The democratic equivalent of Hamlet’s dilemma, to me, is: ‘Should I laugh, or should I cry?’
You may think I am crazy – though I am not. Or, if I am, it is not by choice. Living as we do, in times such as ours, we need to have hearts of flint to be less than crazy. Like Eliot’s lady typist, we know our nerves are frayed. We grapple privately with the fear that we might go bonkers any time. A hard time we have of keeping the fizz in.
The least of the furies plaguing me is the mighty and mythological endeavour which is in progress in Kerala, Bengal, Assam and Puducherry. It seems that the only question which matters to everyone is: who will rule for the next five years?
My problem is a simpler one. How to survive at all.
Strangely, no one seems to be interested in this one question that boils inside my bones.
Everyone is obsessed with ‘Who’s winning?’. But the truth is that, in this obsession, we forget that we are losing.
Governments come and go; each one, elected by us with great fervour and fanfare. Every five years we are promised the moon; or what’s left of it. In reality, we live to bite the dust. Yet the vaudeville goes on and on!
Maybe because age is catching up with me, today I cannot help the thought that elections serve a psychological, not political, purpose. Today I am inclined to agree with some of BJP zealots who feel that elections have become superfluous, given how predictable the results are. Why waste money on conducting them, when they make no material difference? To me, what is distressingly predictable is not the results of elections, with or without EVMs. What drives me over the edge is the predictability of the consequences of all elections. No matter which party wins, I lose.
You disagree?
Actually, you are right. There is a difference: in some cases you lose your pocket; in others, you lose your head.
Lose you shall. Governance has become a soccer match, which you lose even before you kick-off the ball.
It’s not easy to live with this feeling. Maybe it was some such thing that made the Malayalam poet, the late Akkitham, say, “Light (knowledge) is sorrow, my child.” So, let us snuggle our faces in the bosom of darkness. Let’s thank the powers that be for putting ‘the opium of the masses’ on the public distribution system (PDS) in the form of elections.
To Marx, religion was the opium of the masses. Of course, he was ambivalent about its role, contrary to what we assume he meant – perhaps influenced by Lenin, who corrupted Marx by interpreting ‘the opium of the masses’ with what might be called an ‘anaesthesia theory’. In fact, Marx saw the relevance of religion in a better light: he saw religion as the sigh of the oppressed, as the evidence of the survival of feeling in an otherwise heartless world, as some survival of spirit in the prevailing scheme of things which is spiritless. For Marx, religion is an awareness of the suffering of humankind as well as a protest against it, though after its own fashion.
Had Marx lived a few more decades, would he not have modified his views? Would he not have said, ‘politics is the opium of the people’?
Today, if people in their millions everywhere in the world are kept insensitive to the true nature of their predicament, that is not the achievement of religion, but of politics. Electoral politics, in particular.
To see what I mean, imagine an announcement hitting you tomorrow that democratic elections will be suspended for tactical or fiscal reasons for the next fifty years. Believe you me, you’ll scream, tear your hair and hit your heads against TV screens. Perhaps it is for that reason that such an announcement is not made.
I am a proud democrat. But what does my democracy really entitle me to? Every five years I can go to a polling booth and press a button. Thereafter, for the next five years, I am an alien and stranger to the on-going realities in my democracy. Would I not have to be exceptionally lucky even to catch a distant glimpse of my ‘elected representative’, much less get him or her to listen to me?
During these five years, life hits me hard. I bleed. No politician binds up my wounds. No politician even comforts me. Instead, I am told that I am a beneficiary of ‘maximum good governance’. When I try to lean on that, I fall backwards. I bite dust.
And here’s the strange thing. The more violently I fall backwards, the more eagerly I look forward to the next round of elections. I get up early on the polling day. Put on by best clothes. Rush to the polling station. I cast(e) my vote. I feel detoxified, resuscitated, affirmed. An eerie political catharsis creeps over me.
Surely, that is something to be thankful for? As a shrewd Indian politician, Chandrababu Naidu of TDP, said about the relevance of temples and churches: but for them, thousands would be running amok on the streets. I am in ready agreement with Naidu, as far as he goes. But I feel he needs to go farther, and recognize the psychological function of elections; if only because little else is left to them.
Today nothing – neither cinema, sports, sex, drugs – absolutely nothing matches the hysteria of elections in diverting the attention of citizens from their plight. Elections are a marvel. They make losers feel that they are winners. What’s more, they make losers use their freedom of choice again and again, to ensure that they lose all the more. Worse, elections make us believe that we are victors even as we are losing the last foothold on our own life and welfare.
This is truly amazing, mind-boggling. Nothing that our species has discovered matches elections in their capacity to sustain delusions, albeit for a brief spell of time. And when that spell breaks, there’s always the power of propaganda to bank on.
So, the juggernaut of the great democratic elections rumbles on. Citizens strain their muscles, shout themselves hoarse; some even risk their life, to ensure the victory of their beloved representatives – who do not find it all that worthwhile to represent them thereafter. They represent whatever else they are required to – given that, if they don’t, a whip is raised above their heads; while, if they do, position and pelf are ready to be passed to them in full view of the public.
For a few weeks, once every five years, the whip is handed over to our cozened citizens. We play the role of king-makers like desperate souls drinking ourselves to death. We press EVM buttons with aplomb. Disempowerment descends on us even before we leave the booths. It shrouds us even as our representatives do the victory rounds on their streets. Losers all, we retreat to our backyards in order to sit and lick their wounds for five whole years, before it all starts yet again.
