Email
Print
ShareAhmedabad: I was asked a question today that I know must be in the hearts of many. Looking back at the election, do I not regret rejecting the Congress party's offer that I fight the election in Gandhinagar under its banner? "What is it that you really want to do? Go to the Lok Sabha? Be in power? Make a point?" I am asked.
Our society has cancer. It has spread throughout the polity. And it is a multi-pronged cancer. It is corruption: corruption of the mind and the spirit. It is total selfishness. It is the Midas perspective, of all roads leading to moolah. It is the arrogance of the raping nature and thinking we are immune, that our self-perceived power and wealth shield us from natural cataclysms.
And we have become the proverbial ostrich that digs its head in the sand when faced by danger and is convinced that by shutting its eyes, the danger disappears.
To say that we are blinkered would be a joke. We live as though there is no tomorrow. Our so-called planners fall into the trap of five-year electoral cycles and plan only for things that will bear fruit in five years, so that they can take credit for this. Yet, most things that matter take more than five years of foresight. Who will think of those? Who will plan for those?
Over the last 10 years or more, the per capita consumption of grain and pulses in India had fallen. This means that compared to earlier, when we were not such a booming economy, people are getting less to eat. This has direct consequences on our immediate future.
With close to half of our children malnourished or undernourished, our adult population in 10 years will be mentally below average and physically sick, prone to disease and mentally unable to cope with crises or perhaps even complex tasks.
Yet, the right to food is not a reality. We have instead juggled the definition of 'below the poverty line' to a figure that makes it impossible for a poor person to survive on even one meal a day and still qualify for rations. Yes, we can now show our neighbours, the rest of the country and the rest of the world that poverty is falling.
We have bulldozed the homes of the poor to make gardens for the rich. Yet, we have not bulldozed the millions of housing schemes where every rule has been flaunted and every regulation broken. Perhaps those homes could be turned into farms for the landless. Yes, a right to shelter is enshrined in interpretations of our Constitution; but for whom is it enforceable?
We loathe the fact that a person lucky enough to have a ration card gets subsidised kerosene. Our taxes pay for their laziness, we feel. Yet the fact that our LPG cylinders are heavily subsidised, to a far greater extent and far greater cost to the exchequer, is fine with us.
There are a million such instances, of injustice, of exploitation by the state and the state's machinery, of the disdain of the rich for the laws of the country, of the impunity with which our political parties break every rule in the book, of how low we allow our leaders to stoop in order to cling to power.
What do I want to do? I want to gather people who feel this is not the country we want together, people who are ready to devote time to a long journey ahead, and a no-hold barred fight to awaken the spirit in the ordinary person, a spirit that they may not even know still exists.
I want to join people who will fight it through the democratic way, with a truly democratic mandate, and with honesty and a will to empower the people to become citizens of a truly democratic nation, one that is alive every day to the possibilities of citizenship constantly, and not once every five years.
No, I do not regret standing and losing for people power.
