Every time a bomb blast rips through the country, we have the usual sound bytes and live feeds. The politicians who are in power blame it on the terrorists operating out of foreign soil, those sitting in the opposition blames the inaction of the government, both together shed their crocodile tears, the bureaucracy tries to take care of the political bosses so that they are not transferred to oblivion, the media tries to pan their cameras on every square inch of the site, tries to create breaking news every moment, the victims’ families rue their own fate and stare into space. The common man on the street stands stunned, shakes his head and is compelled to move on to earn his daily bread to keep the kitchen fire running. This happens with such repetitiveness that a SOP manual can be made out of this nightmare.
But does this happen only in India and is it that the developed nations get to their act better? Obviously so, as all of us know that after the horrendous 9/11, US has got its act so good that try as they may, the terrorists have never been able to penetrate the cordon even once.
We have had our citizens attacked with surprising regularity. Every time assurances from the government have been galore. Perhaps some of the actions have been initiated only to gather dust in the horrendous red tape of our system. The files must be gathering dust somewhere as some politician has realized that he is short-changed so it is better to dump the whole thing or some bureaucrat must be looking up for orders. In this country the political bosses get to the arena after locking their shame and conscience in some safety vault somewhere and the bureaucrats after getting into their jobs know that the key to a long safe career is to be sub-servient to their bosses.
Time the citizens (the civil society as per the political bosses) sat up and asked some questions. Before I go into that I must admit the way our politicians mouth this word “civil society” gets me to laugh. We all know what they do in the parliaments and assemblies and the broken furniture is proof to that, but is there a more direct way of calling themselves uncivilized?
How does this meek civil society ask the questions due to them? Well RTI has been there, judiciary is also there but given our system both of these procedures are so time consuming we cannot expect to get any speedy redressal.
What then can give the scorpion sting to our politicos to get them out of their cocoons and make them sit up to realize that at the end every job has an accountability ? Simple : a small button on the EVM stating “None of the above”. There have been arguments about how much money will be wasted in having a re-election if this button manages to catch the fancy of the majority, but as a nation are we not wasting enough money anyway on these incompetent representatives of the people, their entourage, kith and kin ? The only difference is perhaps we are spending this money slowly over the years whereas this crazy button will make us bleed at one shot.
What difference does it make ? Are we not bleeding anyway ?
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