Plea to politicians for introspection

Ananya.s.guha

07 September, 2012

The country is going through another crisis after the coal scam. This is nothing new - it is always going through a crisis, and then tides it over. But this time the money involved is enormous, the procedures taken were in utter contempt of the financial code.

THE PRIME Minister is keeping a stoic silence, the Opposition is baying for blood. That is also nothing new, the Opposition is wont to do this, it has always done such clamouring in the past. It has never taken defeat in the right spirit. Instead of working with the ruling parties to sort out all tangles the Opposition has always played the shouting game, amidst a crescendo.

The main opposition is the NDA, the others, like the Leftists, do intervene, make a noise, but we do not have a single united opposition, which can conjoin with each other and sit with the ruling coalition for a consensus. Our political parties do not believe in consensus, they believe in the politics of accusation and counter-accusation. They believe in only finding fault with the ruling party and in the process the decorum of the upper and lower house of parliament are never maintained. In the process, the unity of the country is at stake.

An example is that of Assam. When the supposed riots started in the Bodo areas ostensibly against a minority religious group, one political party and its cohorts, took the opportunity to instigate the local population against that religious minority. The fallout - there were counter-threats in different parts of the country against the people of North East who were in no way associated or remotely connected with the trouble. This seriously threatens a backlash in the North East India, but it is to the credit to the people of this region that nothing untoward happened. This was a potential crisis threatening the entire country. A particular political party and its allies did this not towards love for the people of North East India but because they thought they could point at a common enemy - the minority religious community.

If the ruling party and opposition divide is only a blame game to wrest political power, then there is a serious threat to the integrity of the country. Our political parties and our politicians are always slandering one another, and this gets very personal as well.

Take another example regarding the anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare and his team. The moment the bill came to be passed in the parliament all the political parties, in a way, joined hands to oppose it. So their unity is always based on wrong premises and for their own survival. It is not the integrity of the country that they preserve, but slowly and surely they are the fractious elements which are destroying the country. Nothing could be sadder than this. When one member of Anna Hazare's team made pejorative remarks against politicians in general the entire breed of politicians in parliament protested loudly and looked very united on this matter. The fact is that our politicians should do a lot of introspection, and if there are criminals among them, they should accept it and see what can be done to weed out unwanted elements.

It is the integrity of the country that's at stake. Instead of always blaming extremist elements for this disintegration, our politicians must first look at themselves and see what or what they are not doing to preserve the unity and integrity of this great nation. Otherwise, they will not only sound their death knell but also the country's.