Why Elections 2004 is shining
TAVLEEN SINGH
���
Let me begin by telling you the most heartening thing
I have observed on my travels this election. Wherever
I have gone I have met ordinary, humble Indians � the
type our politicians rudely call the ��common man�� �
who have a single thing they want from their elected
representatives and this is a decent standard of
living.
There has been much talk since the last round of
Assembly elections of how people voted for bijli,
sadak, pani but if you explore the meaning of this in
some depth, as I have lately been doing, you find that
people want to live like they see people live on
television. They want water to come out of taps in
their homes. They want homes that look like houses and
not mud huts. They want electricity so they can watch
their favourite programmes on television and not just
to run the tube well. They want their children to go
to schools that have proper classrooms with chairs and
tables, they want mobile phones and Maruti cars, and
they want their sons and daughters to get jobs in
proper offices and not just in the fields.
Jobs are what they want more than anything else
because they see them as the key to getting everything
else. In earlier Lok Sabha elections, even in the last
one, there were other issues that dominated. Last time
round, there was anger at Sonia Gandhi for having
pulled the government down over ��272 and many more
coming�� and there was a feeling that Atal Behari
Vajpayee needed to be given a fair chance to rule
India. Earlier there were all sorts of other reasons
that influenced voting. Assassinations, caste,
corruption, temples, secularism and going back to �77
democracy itself, but this time round when the voter
says koi kaam nahin kiya about his MP he immediately
points to open drains, unbuilt roads and irregular
supplies of electricity and water as evidence.
The truth is that however much India might be shining,
the average Indian, even the middle-class Indian,
continues to live in conditions that would be
considered unfit for human beings in almost any other
country. He wants this to change and he wants change
to happen tomorrow.
When I speak of a standard of living I begin with the
image of a decent house. But, in our fair and wondrous
land on account of the state having taken full
responsibility for providing ��housing for the poor��
in socialist times the poor in our cities live mostly
in windowless hovels without clean water, sanitation
or minimum public hygiene and always on the edge of
filthy, open drains. Living standards in rural parts
are only marginally better in that there are open
fields (instead of dirty lavatories) and clean air but
the average dwelling is still pretty much a windowless
hovel. Well, dear readers, on my travels this time I
was pleased to see that most people no longer
considered this good enough and the reason for the
change is television. I have not so far been to a
single village where television had not arrived in one
way or other. Desperately poor Dalits in Bihar said
they watched it in the houses of the upper castes and
in villages that had never seen electricity they used
tractor batteries to watch.
Television has acted in rural India as an engine of
change. Us intellectual types bemoan the evils of MTV
and Hindutva�s culture police fear that our ��ancient
civilization�� will fall to pieces when it clashes
with America�s instant culture but for the average
Indian television has brought the 21st century into
his cloistered, blinkered world. And, you cannot begin
to imagine what a closed world it was not so very long
ago.
In the eighties I can remember going with Swami
Agnivesh to a village near Daltonganj in Bihar�s
Palamau district to meet people who had been kept in
bondage by a local farmer. The farm was no more than
ten kilometres from Daltonganj but the bonded
labourers we met had never been there. The outside
world quite simply did not exist. When P V Narasimha
Rao was Prime Minister I remember going to a village,
a hundred kilometres from Udaipur, where they could
not name a single Indian Prime Minister. They had
heard of Rajiv Gandhi but for the wrong reason. ��Who
was the one they killed with a garland?��
There may still be villages in the wilds of Orissa and
Bihar and even Rajasthan which remain areas of
darkness but television will probably penetrate even
these soon enough.
Right. Now having given you the good news can I tell
you what I find most depressing about this election? I
find the spectacle of the baba log tumbling out of
political cradles from Kashmir to Kanyakumari deeply
depressing. There are some that show promise but by
and large the sons and daughters who have appeared on
the electoral landscape to claim Daddy or Mummy�s seat
look like children who would never have been able to
hold a job in any other area of enterprise. To a man,
they have wives who are heiresses while they (poor
things) have barely a bit of pocket money to get by on
according to the assets they have declared. And,
almost to a man (the women are even worse) have no
political opinions worth discussing.
The baba log will have to go if the political system
is to throw up the kind of political leaders who will
bring real change and real change is what the Indian
voter now wants.
courtesy: The Sunday Express
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25�
http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash
##########################################################################
# Send submissions for Goanet to [EMAIL PROTECTED] #
# PLEASE remember to stay on-topic (related to Goa), and avoid top-posts #
# More details on Goanet at http://joingoanet.shorturl.com/ #
# Please keep your discussion/tone polite, to reflect respect to others #
##########################################################################
