Your political views: xxxxx?

I’m on Facebook a lot these days. I like to look at what people are saying, feeling, thinking (although some comments do make me wonder about the thinking bit).

Initially, I was reluctant to add people as friends unless they actually felt like friends. But now I’ve let go. If I can add someone I know slightly or have only corresponded with, what’s stopping me from ‘friending’ total strangers?

But before allowing strangers into my online life, I scan their info pages — Is it a student? Journalist? Activist? Artist? Writer? Reader? What are his/her politics?

Friend requests come from religious hardliners and right-wing chest-thumpers. Also from leftists, libertarians, atheists, humanists. Last week, I was surprised to see a request from a student whose political views were listed as democratic. Surprised, because it is so rare.

Very few people choose ‘democracy’ when asked for their political views. In fact, I’ve gotten used to responses like: ‘I hate politics’. Or ‘Nil’. Or ‘xxxxx’.

I suppose, there is legitimate cause for disenchantment. Too many politicians let us down, too often. And yet, as Madhu Kishwar recently pointed out, to tar all politicians with the same brush is to wage war against democracy.

To say that you have no political views at all is to say that you don’t give a damn about what happens to this country. And this, I worry, is at the heart of our crisis: this ‘xxxxx’ which allows us to shrug off all political responsibilities. A democracy, after all, must be ‘of the people, by the people’ before it can become ‘for the people’.

We must learn to respect our own choices. If we cannot stand our politicians, then we must become politicians ourselves. It is unfair that we refuse to think about who should represent and govern us, and then pretend we’re too disillusioned to care because ‘they’re all the same’.

A lot of opposition to the Anna Hazare-led campaign for an all-powerful Lokpal stems from this hold-my-nose attitude to politics. While Hazare hasn’t crystallised his political views into the cryptic ‘xxxxx’, he doesn’t think he could win elections. Perhaps he believes that only big money wins elections, and he isn’t the only one. I meet far too many people who have so little faith in the Indian masses that they advocate dictatorship as a form of governance.

But I’m surprised at activists like Medha Patkar backing a supra-democratic institution. Patkar must be distressingly familiar with situations where the people’s will is disregarded, where panchayats are not consulted, where life-altering decisions are taken by those who have no stake in protecting the local environment, where people’s representatives are falsely accused by vested interests?

In fact, Patkar and other National Alliance of People’s Movements activists had set up a political outfit called the People’s Political Front. I wonder what happened. There’s been little news of it since its birth was announced. Why isn’t PPF giving us candidates who could show the nation what non-corrupt governance looks like?

If that is proving to be impossible — if it’s indeed impossible to win elections in India by fielding good candidates who work towards the public good and then appeal to the masses for support — then we really must re-imagine our constitution, our nation, ourselves. And we must also try and imagine what a non-democracy looks like. My new Facebook friend already knows. He’s Tibetan. Perhaps that’s why his political views are firmly democratic.

And so long as India remains a democratic republic, let us try not to hate it. Because to say that you hate politics is to say that you hate the people of India.    
 
Annie Zaidi writes poetry, stories, essays, scripts (and in a dark, distant past, recipes she never actually tried)