Staying hungry and staying foolish

I always wondered as to how the preacher of the so called satya & ahinsa with his pious platitudes and tokenism which always never gave the concrete solution to any problem was able to exercise such a popularity among the masses of India to enjoy a god like status. The puzzle was that how this instant saintly acts crash course was so readily lapped up by the bovine millions to ultimately go to their doom of losing one third of their country and yet have the audacity of calling it independence.

All of these answers were found when Anna & Co began their soap opera of Lokpal hunger strike, first for five days in April (which conveniently started after India won the World cup on 2nd Apr 2011 and ended on 8th Apr 2011, the day IPL 2011 began) and the next, more popular one that lasted for two weeks in August of the same year, which caused some ultra sensitive people to name the event as the second satyagraha or the second fight for independence. It was a tough choice between whether to enjoy the entertainment or grimace at the pathetic mentality of the Indian sheeple. It ended as it had started, abruptly, with the propped up saintly figure dissolving his team due to some "issues". The so called crusaders for justice did everything from pandering to extremist minority clerics to shifting the focus from definite names from the ruling party to the nameless corrupt politician.

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And how did it end? The second in command ‘’Mr Honesty” Arvind Kejriwal used this moment to leverage himself to the forefront, formed his political party AAP and in just three years was elected the CM of Delhi. What happened to Mr Kisan Hazare? Well he found other temporary causes for a hunger strike. At the time of writing, no one cares. A lot of former comrades in arms found themselves booted out of the party by Mr Honesty for not towing the line.)

The answer is that inspite of suffering a millenia and half of barbaric invasions and disasters, we still dont know what is good for us and what is bad for us. We are always ready at a drop of hat to put anyone on a pedestal who is big on talk and slogans rather than being big on action.

In classic Gandhian style, the whole show revolves around a propped up figurehead who looks saintly and provides the much needed sacred face

It was a case study in Gandhism and its followers, the bovine millions. The only difference was that in the 1920s it was the unlettered peasants and in 2011 was that it was the educated fools of the middle (actually muddle) class.

Tokenism and Symbolism which are the very foundations of Gandhism are absolutely futile things at their face value which however have an appearance of being something great.

Therefore, going shirtless because so many poor don't have clothes looks sweet but it doesn't do anything to alleviate poverty.

Spinning one's own yarn to promote swadeshi was a surely nice gesture, but in the end, all the cloth spun by Gandhians with their charkhas was not able to clothe a single poor man dying of hunger or cover the battered and bruised naked body of a Hindu or Sikh woman gang raped by Muslim League rioters.

Calling lower caste people Harijan doesn't do anything to allevate their status in the society (no wonder that you cannot utter the word Harijan in public today unless you want to be beaten black and blue). Joining the work of manual scavenging calling it the greatest service to mankind did not make the life of manual scavengers easy. What was needed was implementations of sanitary measures. But then, Gandhism never revolved around concrete action and remedy.

The biggest illusion of the hunger strike fuelled movement was that it was for removing corruption. It wasn't. It was for passing the Janlokpal bill, which according to the thinking of Team Anna is going to make corruption vanish like a tail off a gorilla's posterior.This claim that Janlokpal is the answer to every corruption ill in India is nothing short of mass deception.All the public anger is purposefully being diverted from known guilty faces to the nameless neta. This will result in confusion which is too easy to spread in a bovine mob like us and see the old criminal entities being reelected again.

So to end the corruption in the government agencies which is largely due to the gigantic bureaucratic setup that sucks up the public funds like a black hole, the Janlokpal will set up a parallel bureaucratic network to monitor the bureaucrats who are corrupt. And this parallel network will need to very large to monitor the existing babus.Its like creating a gang of pedophiles to monitor child molestation incidents, a reminder of the adage that sometimes, cure is worse than the malady itself.

Shouldnt we look to curb the bureaucracy itself, make it less numerous, more accountable, less all powerful instead of creating a brigade of superbureaucrats to see that the existing ones behave?  Are you solving the problem or creating a bigger one? And what about the corruption in private sector? When is that going to be addressed?

Plus the inclusion of socialists and progressives in the committee does not make it seem any prettier. Everyone in the team seems to want India to go back to its license raj days when Made in India was a shameful label and shortage was the way of life. They seem to stress on the fact that economic liberalisation is the cause of India's ills when in fact its absence was the very cause. You can find any of them sitting on an agitation trying to derail any new project which aims for power generation, always in the name of "the poor and the downtrodden".The same bunch of people talk of revoking the Armed forces special powers act in areas where secessionism is rife like Kashmir and the North Eastern states like Manipur and Nagaland. Do we want such people to decide India's destiny? People who are mysteriously funded by shadowy organizations, whos sympathies lie with left wing extremism and anti national elements, who are against any kind of development in any field and spit on any symbol or act of nationalism. Do we need the trojan horses funded by dubious sources and having shady agenda and origins to decide our destiny?

The very act of hunger strike until death is used as blackmail by Gandhians. Hunger strike till death can be undertaken only by the very bravest who are totally committed to their cause, someone like Jatin Das in 1929 and Bobby Sands in 1981, both of whom went on a fast for 70 days before losing their battle with death. Never in a million years can Gandhians have such courage.

Never will a Gandhian go on a fast unto death if there are chances of him or her really dying. Because that requires total committment to the cause. Gandhism is an ideology of convenience.Convenient nationalism. Convenient principles. Convenient agitations. Convenient causes. Everything is convenient, with loopholes and escape at the last movement is always available. That is why the country was partitioned inspite of tall claims of it could only happen over the so called great man's dead body.

Ofcourse, people like Indians who have no interest in knowing history, let alone learning something from it and avoiding further mistakes, will never realize this or never look beyond what has been projected to them. Escapist and shameless as we all are, we are so very glad to point fingers at civil servants , criminal elements and politicians, conveniently forgetting that it is us who create them and put them on a pedestal for our own short sighted aims and petty desires.

Corruption is not merely the act of giving something under the table. Corruption is mainly moral and ideological. And we suffer from it enmasse. Financial corruption is just a puny offshoot of it. Corruption thrives in a special kind of environment where the gains of the individual and the gains of the society and country are totally opposite. Inspite of all our self proclaimed morality, we have not been able to merge the two. Unless we can build such a society which can be very assured that the gains of the individuals that constitute it are no different from that of a greater good, all this talk of ending corruption is nothing but a third rate script of a slapstick comedy.As long as we beleive in tokenism instead of permanent remedy and pious platitudes and empty talk instead of concrete action towards a greater good, Bharat Mahaan will never progress beyond being a bickering society of little people.