Comment

The fate of our nation will be decided today or so it would appear from all the excitement that has surrounded this trust vote and the nuclear deal before that. But however sophisticated and complex the nuclear deal may be — almost as much as nuclear science itself it seems — the fallout of the deal has been the crassest kind of negotiating that Indian politics can manage.

Whether Mayawati can break a bit of the Samajwadi Party or Ajit Singh can get an airport namedafter his father has brought everything down to the lowest common denominator. Just like the average person wants his everyday life to get better, so the
Indian politician is trying to improve his immediate situation.

As it is with politics, so with religion: However hi-falutin’ or finely nuanced or marvellously mystical a religion may be, it ultimately comes down to a daily negotiation with the ruling deity of a person’s own mind or social and cultural conditioning, so beautifully elucidated in French anthropologist Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained.

Which is why no matter what Islam actually says theAl-Qaeda will believe what suits it and Asaram Bapu’s followers feel they have a right to kill and maim people when they feel threatened and the Catholic church ignored child abuse for years for which the Pope has been forced to willy-nilly make an apology of sorts. High theology and morality has no place in the practice of religion.

But for both politics and religion, it’s what happens down at the ground level that matters. What people want from government is governance. Yes, in times of war and national insecurity they want strong leadership and decision-making. For the rest of the time, they want thebasics to work. The basics are boring to Indian politicians, apart from beingtedious and time-consuming.

You cannot bother the Prime Minister’s Office with information that public transport in your city is shoddy or the schools are third grade and so on. They all know and no one wants to know.

For weeks we have been watching our politicians have hysterics over this nuclear deal. Prakash Karat insists that we are being sold into slavery. But on an everyday level, Karat perhaps travels by car so is not that concerned that buses are inadequate or of a bad quality. Are buses class enemies? Other politicians are turning into counting machines and conjurers trying to collect votes they can trust.

As far as religion goes, you want your daughter to pass an exam, you want a good job, you want your father to get better — these are the demands you make from divinity. You are not praying for world peace on a regular basis if at all.

You maintain a tradition of weekly abstinence so you can get what you want and build up a goodness guarantee against possible later transgressions. There is no daily assurance that anyone is listening, but there is, apparently, solace.

Sadly, politics offers no such ritualistic solution to everyday issues. You read that the government wants to build homes which have no flushes in the toilets. You infer that this is to help some builders. You know that the government of the day doesn’t care two hoots beyond the present.

The issue is so small as not to matter — except for those thousands of people who live in flush-less buildings of course. Prayer may exist as an option for them.

In many parts of the developed world, on their journey to economic success, they made sure that they secured the basics early on — the schools, the buses, the hospitals. We have taken another route.

Therefore, we can have fine and articulate arguments about nuclear energy but not one politician discusses the lack of electricity in vast stretches of India as a pro or anti argument. We all know the situation, what’s there to say.

I predict, therefore, that the nation will survive regardless of the outcome of this trust vote. And the struggle to get into that train or bus or hang on to your toilet flush will continue.

Email: b_ranjona@dnaindia.net