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| Kejriwal with Hazare |
Today is the day when good triumphs over evil. Durga, having slain the buffalo demon Mahishasura is going back home, while Ravana is consigned to the flames. This year, adding a touch of the contemporary to the myths, there was the ritual burning of an FDI (foreign direct investment) Ravana as well.
Clearly, the Indian ethos has posited its right to the moral society by ruthlessly slaying the monster on every major festival, be it Holi, Diwali or Dussehra. But mythopoesis is dead. These cardboard iterations do not reverberate with the present political priesthood of our country, existing as tokens, while we perpetrate a system that merrily reiterates a completely opposite worldview—the powerful are always good and get to go scot-free. It is something that has been fomented by the systems in India for the last 65 years.
Even as it leaves a contented feeling among simple souls, there seems to be something primitive in this good vs evil trope, particularly when it is carried into the political and social narrative of our times. Arvind Kejriwal says let’s throw out all the corrupt politicians irrespective of which party they are in. Great. And then? Replace them with what he calls “aam aadmi”. But is there a guarantee that this mystic being will not get corrupted once he/she is in power. His original mentor Anna Hazare goes a step further and declares that he wouldn’t allow anyone with a sullied past into his Gandhian movement.
This is as close a “lakshman rekha” as we have ever seen in politics. There will be “good” people who have the right to canvass for votes and then there are the “evil” politicians all of whom need to be ostracized and banned from the political life of the country. Sadly, such divides don’t exist. There are no good people, nor evil ones. Ravana mastered the Vedas, the scriptures, and the arts of warriors (Kshatriyas). He was also an excellent Veena player. Would he have qualified for Kejriwal’s party?
In mature countries, there are systems that ensure people in public offices don’t go off track. And when they do, retribution is swift and sure. That is something our politicians have circumvented with extreme wiliness, and that because there haven’t been enough safeguards to prevent them from doing so. The best of men, and some women, exploited their position once they realized there was no price to be paid for doing so. Like Vikramaditya’s fabled throne, it has always been about the place and not the person.
In 1644, John Milton, the great English poet in his essay “Areopagitica” (ironically an appeal to Parliament to rescind an order to bring publishing under government control) wrote: “Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably…It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world.”
Rituals are just another operatic divestment of guilt for those who insist on treating politics as some form of religion. Religion is, after all, a social response to insecurity and in our collective Faustian bargain we are trying to assuage this guilt day after day with symbolic assertions of the supremacy of good. Maybe if we stopped venerating the good so much and calling out unfairness that results only because of those able to wield power, we might yet get one strand of honesty back into our DNA. Festivals like Dussehra are ritualized safety valves that get by with ritual blood-letting in society, even as the issue of equality is never addressed except in the notional sphere. The street fests of Arvind Kejriwal and before that, of Anna Hazare, are more relevant as they pull out the rats from veiled “royal” precincts and ask for justice.
See Also: Times India.
Post Tags: Arvind Kejriwal, Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and Anna Hazare, FDI, Corruption, Dussera, Views.
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