Copycat Democracy: Gangnam Style

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

I thought it would be a good idea to let him see where I work, so I invited him along. As soon as we entered my office, he began making a ruckus. Not only did he start shouting at random people, he began to break off pieces of the furniture and throw them at the cubicles on the other side of the isle. We were unable to do any work that day and had to suspend our proceedings. Serves me right for trying to celebrate ‘Bring Your MP to Work’ day.

Watching the Democratic National Convention while politicians in India continued to punch democracy in the face, gave a lot of people on twitter some pause. They were wondering why our polity is not more like America’s. ZOMG! Obama let a pizza shop owner give him a belly-to-belly suplex-hug. When will Sonia Gandhi/LK Advani/Manmohan Singh/Narendra Modi do that?

Whenever something terrible happens in our politics (which is almost every alternate day), people are always wondering why we couldn’t be more like America. We always want to adopt other country’s traditions..P.A. Sangma even called for a Presidential debate like the ones they hold during American elections. Which was great except for one thing: Presidents in India don’t really set policy. They’re supposed to sit there and parrot whatever the Prime Minister and his ‘council of ministers’ tell him. What would have Sangma and Mukherjee argued about in their hypothetical debates? That who would use better cutlery while entertaining creepy heads of state? Let’s import a system without first understanding how it works! Not that there aren’t things wrong with the American system; as some fellow once said, I like it but I have some notes.

Democracy is the art of selecting the person you feel will do the least damage to the country, even though sometimes a couple of people who care about actual policy and wanting to do some good manage to sneak in. In India, we don’t elect politicians based on their policy credentials. We elect them based on their last name or if they have the same caste as us or if they promise us a free colour teevee after the election. No one who is serious about tackling corruption or enacting laws that would benefit a large swathe of the populace will spend large amounts of illicit money providing potential voters with more alcohol than the other guy. The system of democracy always seems greener on the other side of the fence (unless the country on the other side of the fence is Pakistan. Then it’s a land so barren that it has less life than Mars). For example, many analysts in America have argued for a multi-party system’ while in India, we once lived under Prime Minister Deve Gowda, the best argument against a multi-party system.

People also lament the fact that we don’t have an Indian ‘Jon Stewart.’ That’s because as a country, we don’t have a sense of humour. We tend to take things very seriously. We get so worked up about shit that doesn’t matter. We even arrest people for ‘sedition.’

Sedition is blasphemy by another name. Both consist of perceived crimes against man-made symbols which must be protected from imaginary assault and both don’t belong in a democratic country. We think symbols of our democracy are more important than our democracy itself. These ‘symbols’ have survived wars, famine, emergency, assassinations, currency devaluation, coalition governments and terrorist attacks. Nothing is more insulting to them than the fact that we presume that they cannot handle being mocked by a shitty cartoonist.

We are unable to laugh at ourselves. We turn everything we like into a revered object that we expect everyone else in the world to also treat with ‘utmost respect.’  And we’re ready to gather into a mob and go on a rampage if they don’t.

In a healthy democracy, no god, no person and no symbol should be above being mocked.

Not even Sachin Tendulkar.

The Great Indian Presidential Bash

(A shorter version of this appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Breakout the bubbly, toss the confetti and release some white doves. The Republic of India is about to elect a new President!

Not that most of the country gives a crap about the office of the President. Nobody besides news junkies and ‘general knowledge enthusiasts’ is paying any attention to this contest. The thing is, the President doesn’t really have any real power. He or she is not even the premier freeloader in our long list of freeloaders system of governance. We don’t really want to learn the names of people who we can’t blame for the malaise that has taken over our lives. The Prime Minister, yes. The buck stops with him! He is supposed to be the real leader of the government. The first among equals. So we can easily blame him. But the President? One of the main reasons that position exists is because our founders wanted to show a big, democracy-shaped middle finger to the British Empire. Look at you England, with your fake monarch wearing stolen jewellery. Real democracies have semi-elected titular heads-of-state! Suck on that, subservient realms of the commonwealth.

Most Presidents in our country have occupied that august office after a hard fought victory on ‘India’s Got Sycophants.’ The rules of this contest are simple: if you’re a good sycophant with at least a couple of independent opinions, you get to be a Rajya Sabha MP. If you’re a really good sycophant – with no independent thought process whatsoever and a disturbingly eager need to please – you get to become Governor of a state. And the most sycophantic of them all – a person who not only is incapable of having a pre-approved brain fart but doesn’t even go to the bathroom without prior permission – advances to the final round and gets to be President.

This year they must have raided an old people’s home for contenders to the Presidency. People were coming out of the woodwork to declare their candidacy. Though tragic Satyajit Ray movie character Pranab Mukherjee was the favourite, for a minute there it looked like his ambition would be thwarted again. Even though he had been campaigning for months, the sphinx of 10 Janpath remained unmoved. She only belatedly agreed to his candidacy when Mamta Banerjee showed once again that she is three colours short of a full palette. While PA Sangma continued to lose even the last shreds of his dignity, Abdul Kalam allowed himself to be used as a political football again.  Now that we’re done with the five-yearly fake national wankfest over him, the next time he will be all over the news is when someone frisks him at an airport. Hell, even the angriest man on Indian television, Ram Jethmalani, threatened to nimbly sprint for President. Jethmalani, of course, is the standard bearer for lost causes. He has fought and lost more contests than an IPL team led by Sourav Ganguly. In fact, he even lost the online contest for ‘the drunkest Indian’ thanks to some last minute strategic voting by confused Narendra Modi fans.

Since our press corps are always gunning for a crisis – these are the same people who literally spend days arguing over hypothetical events which most of the time never even happen – so if they get a whiff of even a remote possibility of a real political dogfight, they’re going to suck that puppy dry. They turned this boring contest into a staged WWE spectacle. Pranab Mukherjee was transformed into Hulk Hogan: all hype and no substance. A man respected and lauded for his achievements, even though he has spent his whole career sucking up to his boss and trying to stop others from getting ahead. Abdul Kalam was Ric Flair: a man who has achieved a lot in his life but refuses to retire gracefully and keeps showing up to the arena even though no one wants him anymore. PA Sangma was the Brooklyn Brawler: a man who only exists to lose the match and make the other guy look stronger than he actually is.

Even the left parties made a cameo appearance in this extravaganza. The left parties are the Ultimate Warrior of Indian politics: they could have almost been in the main event, but thanks to their own warped sense of reality, they are so far away from the mainstream that no one even remembers who they are.  

The winner of this Presidential summer slam was Pranab Mukherjee. Let this be a lesson to all the children – if you’re a sycophant to enough members of the Gandhi clan, if you spend your whole life thwarting your ambition and then use all your surrogates in the media to spend months promoting your candidacy – then you too can ascend to the highest office in the land!

In all this hullaballoo, we might miss giving the current occupant a proper send-off. Although in a gallery full of individuals even history will not bother to remember, Pratibha Patil stands out as ordinary, I, for one will miss President God Whisperer. The hilarious thing about making an alleged conwoman President is the blatantly hilarious highway robbery she continues to (allegedly!) commit. I’d be more outraged at the stadium sized house she planned to build, or her outrageously inappropriate foreign jaunts in which she took along everyone who even shared a small atomic fraction of her DNA, but living in this country if there is one thing I have learned, it’s that if you can’t arrest them and put them in jail, at least make terribly unfunny jokes about them.

Every time the Presidential elections roll around, one is reminded of what a strange fellow once said, never have so many fought for something of so little value. Why does anyone want to be President anyway? You have no real duties. People come to you with complaints you have no powers of addressing. The government will saddle you with clemency applications which are a political time bomb. However, you can pretty much do whatever you want while somebody else pays for it. You get to tour the world like a person of actual importance. You get to live in one of the largest palaces in the world. You get to host people who actually are capable of re-making the world. You can get every useless member of your family a job for life. And you get a salary while you do all this.

Wait; is it too late to throw my hat in for consideration?

Dial Di for Delusion

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

As India’s favorite insane asylum outpatient, Mamta Banerjee celebrated the first year of her reign of terror and darkness, the kind folks at Sardesai TV had a bright idea. They decided to stop shouting for a couple of minutes and hold a Q & A session with the newish overlord of West Bengal. And then, in a scenario which even a casual viewer of a badly plotted sitcom could foresee, during the session, the minute someone asked her a real question, Ms. Banerjee not only refused to offer an answer, but for good measure called the person asking the question a maoist (as you do!) and then walked out. It takes real talent to share a stage with Sagarika Ghose and still come out looking like the crazy one, but, if anyone can accomplish this arduous task, then it’s the Commie Crusher of Calcutta. This is what happens when you surround yourself with yes-men and don’t allow any contradictory opinion to even wander near your frontal lobe. Maybe if she left the padded room they keep her in once in a while there would be hope that maybe one day she would have a tiny grip on reality?

It seems that delusion is an important part of public life in this country.

Perhaps it is why human tub of lard and Information and Broadcasting minister Kapil Sibal was able to stand on the ‘sacred’ floor of parliament and be able to claim, with a straight face, that India is perhaps more liberal than even America or Western Europe. So liberal it hurts! So liberal that we ban books without reading them. So liberal that we send the most number of takedown notices to Google. So liberal that we deny visas to foreign journalists who are critical of our policies.  Maybe he actually does believe the constant obfuscation he offers in lieu of real answers?

Although that was nothing compared to the travesty that was the ‘celebration’ of the three years in government of the second iteration of the UPA. That is like throwing a party to commemorate that drunken night three years ago when you had a one night stand with a random person and they gave you syphilis. Though no one was surprised because this government has turned tone-deafness into an art form. Not only have they spent each excruciating day in the past three years muddling from one crisis to the next, they are so barren that every time some wayward ally threatens to pull the rug from beneath their feet, a small part of you kind of wants them to go ahead with their threat so that this mass of diseased puss pretending to govern the country for the past few years can finally be put out of its misery. Only a deluded party would look at the drubbing it received in the assembly elections held in the country’s biggest state and try to convince itself that it was not a repudiation of its policies; that it would have won the elections had it not been for infighting. That it decided to stay the course is a testament to the long distance relationship between reality and the leaders of the Congress party.

Of course, if we had a proper opposition they would capitalize on such brazen incompetence. However, our principal opposition party is made up of a rag-tag bunch of jokers - bereft of any ideas - who cannot even stand the sight of each other yet still persist with the pretension of being a cohesive unit only because of their unmitigated and naked lust for power.  An opposition party which continues to offer nothing but empty, unproductive gestures instead of any legitimate debate or any useful policies. The opposition parties in this country are so weak and helpless that they forcibly ceded their space to desi Robin Hood and his merry band of tax evading, expense fudging, and invective throwing minions.

Now, nobody currently embodies the collective delusion of our political class more than P.A. Sangma. A politician who was important for a few minutes in 1996, and is on what many observers would describe – if they want to be really, really kind -  as a quixotic quest to be President. In his shamelessness, he has even managed to sell out the very people whose interests he claims to care for. According to Sangma, letting him mangle English words for five years in Rashtrapati Bhavan would right all the wrongs of the past. The profound distance the North East has felt from the mainland, the years of being ignored by the central government, it would all be fixed if they make a guy who even members of his own party aren’t aware of, the President. The most incredulous claim he has made is that a President Sangma would bring down naxalism and hurt the insurgency. Yes, a President Sangma would also find a cure for cancer, fix the imbalanced gender ratio, singlehandedly bring an end to the corruption that ails the country and make it rain cute puppies and edible confetti all the time.

Which brings us back to Mamta Banerjee. She ended her week by leading a protest against the government. This was an act of such bravado that it caused a fissure in the space-time continuum. Even though she is in government both at the centre and the state, she figured that the best plan of action would be to lead a procession against both these entities. Usually she is just judge, jury and executioner; however, this time she was both Chief Minister and the Leader of Opposition. There was even an awkward moment when she, in her capacity as chief minister, called herself, in her capacity as leader of opposition, a maoist.

Somewhere in famous people heaven, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are looking down on her and going “Even we can’t cure this.”