The finger

The Election Commission probably wasn’t aware of the significance of the middle finger when it decided to dab indelible ink on it. Here’s a news report with a photograph of the Maharashtra Chief Minister and his wife. Hilarious.

The individual and the collective

Abheek Barman writes-

Over the years, Mumbai managed to redevelop its mill areas into bustling centres of trade, manufacturing and commerce. Bengal’s Left prefers to wait for decades before hawking off bits and pieces of the rust belt to property speculators and then go looking for farmland to set up industries, losing both worker and farmer along the way.

In 1930, the Soviet Union invited a unusually perceptive observer over for a guided tour. Instead of being impressed by what he saw, the visitor wrote: “It’s not clear to me whether they’ve understood the differences between individual and collective needs. In that respect they’re similar to fascists. They smother individual needs for the good of the collective. They forget that you can’t strengthen the collective by weakening the individual.” The visitor was Rabindranath Tagore. Bengal’s Left should listen.

A noble lie

A commentator at Sauvik’s blog asks-

Do you not think that the definition of ‘socialism’ is completely subjective? I could just say that I define socialism as that system which is for the benefit of all and I believe that libertarianism is for the benefit of all. Why not just register a party and get on with campaigning?

(Read his post on why this is relevant.) In his reply, Sauvik says, among other things-

And why should we commit perjury just to enter electoral politics?

The problem here is not the lie; not all lies are bad – there is Plato’s “noble lie,” though that one is definitely not “noble.” But you get the drift. Or that we don’t have a liberal political party. The problem here is that we don’t have a “liberal people.”

The Libertarian Party in the US has existed for approximately forty years now. And it is “still” politically irrelevant. People are not interested in individual rights, and private property, and the right to free speech. They are interested in – depending on where they live, and their “sophistication” – free roads, free toilets, free television sets, free rice, jobs for life, bailouts, loan waivers… Who pays? Who cares? You don’t have to be dressed in rags to be a beggar. You could be dressed in a three-piece suit and still beg self-righteously; you wouldn’t call it begging though – that would be insulting. Then they are interested in religion, and forcing it down others’ throats; in various “causes,” and again, forcing other to adopt them. Who cares if these “others” are interested? If you don’t fix this, your political party will be just as irrelevant as the US LP. Then there is the question of sanction, or as Sauvik calls it, “a matter of principle.” By taking part in the electoral process in any manner – voting, standing for elections etc etc – you declare that you accept the process, and its outcome. Which you don’t.

I will reiterate what I said the last time round – “A republic can either be based on the principle of individual rights, or on the principle of not respecting such rights. India preferred the second alternative a long time back.” That’s what you have to fix to “sustain” liberalism in India.

Perverse logic

As everybody knows, India is full of busybodies – people who have nothing better to do than spend their time and energy in thinking up plans on how to force people to do things they don’t want to do, and take them to court if they don’t do it. Here’s another example-

“Each voter must be forced to vote,” [cardiologist Sarode's] counsel argued. “But how do you enforce compulsory voting by voters? asked the [Supreme Court] Bench probably hearing such a plea for the first time, though a pending PIL is seeking a right for the voter to cast a negative vote saying none of the candidates in the fray were worth his vote.

The response shocked the Bench, for the counsel suggested that those who do not vote could face disconnection of their electricity and water supplies or be even saddled with a fine.

If I become PM, the first thing I will do is bring in a law against busybodies – the men who flogged Chand Bibi will be imported from Swat and appointed Chief Floggers, and every busybody will be publicly flogged on Independence Day at Rajpath. Idiots.

—

Then here’s the case of Gill’s danda-

Angry at the ‘cavalier’ attitude of cricketing icons towards the Padma awards, the sports ministry asked the home ministry on Thursday to make it compulsory for the awardees to receive the honour in person, failing which, they must seek prior “apology” for being unable to do so.

He thinks its an honor. I think its an insult. Forcing people to accept an award – a feudal mentality at display. Not to be outdone, some busybody has filed a case against both Dhoni and Singh. Where’s my turban? Where’s my cane? And where’s Rajpath?

–

And here’s an inane editorial from the Times. Seems the editor received the same government subsidized education that I received. I learned my lessons. He apparently didn’t-

They’re tossing tea bags into the White House lawns and staging tea party protests on Tax Day all over America, while the governor of Texas darkly hinted that his state might have reason to secede from America if federal taxes weren’t lowered. The reference is to the Boston tea party of 1773, which ignited the American revolution. While the colonists were protesting taxes imposed on them when they weren’t allowed elected representatives two centuries ago, that logic doesn’t hold this time. After all President Barack Obama, against whom the current protests are directed, just got elected. The protest therefore seems to be against taxes. And an effort to give the Right something to yell about.

[...]

What tea party protesters have overlooked is that with growing job losses in the US people are looking to government to bail them out, but that isn’t possible if the government has no money.

That’s precisely it, dodo. They don’t want to pay to bail someone else out. Further, the American Revolution wasn’t just about representation, it was about T-Y-R-A-N-N-Y. You see, logic isn’t taught in Indian schools. Neither is thinking. Hence we memorize stuff, and out-dodo each other.

Sometimes I think the wrong people are locked up in jails and mental asylums.

Elections, Obama etc

Today was a good day as far as the quantity of news stories and op-eds are concerned. First there was Samajwadi Party shooting itself in the foot with its manifesto that I referred to in my previous post. Then – I didn’t notice this before but the Times of India has managed to publish the columns of a rightist (Dasgupta) , leftist (Akbar) and centrist (Swami) on the same page – Swapan Dasgupta mocks the snobbery of the elitists standing for elections-

If editorial approval, Facebook encouragement and celebrity endorsements can shape an election, Independent candidate Meera Sanyal will be the clear winner in battle for Mumbai South. Needless to say, the possibility of such an outcome is about as high as Sonia Gandhi making an extempore speech. The best that Sanyal, the “daughter of Mumbai South” who (in the spirited prose of Shobhaa De) has deigned “to get her hands dirty”, can hope is to save her security deposit. The same is true for Mallika Sarabhai who is taking on L K Advani in Gandhinagar on the strength of her illustrious surname and local roots.

They need political parties, he says. Then MJ Akbar, former editor of The Asian Age, says that Obama has committed his first howler-

If necessity is the mother of invention then politics is often the father. Barack Obama has invented a phrase that did not exist on January 20, the day he became president. Anxious to win a war through the treasury rather than the Pentagon, he has discovered something called the “moderate Taliban” in Afghanistan. Joe Biden, his vice president, has found the mathematical coordinates of this oxymoron: only 5% of the Taliban are “extremists”.

Welcome to Obama’s first big mistake.

He’s wrong. I have lost count of all the “mistakes” Obama has committed since he entered office – genuflecting before the Saudi king should probably be right up there – not to mention all the broken promises. Frost never said anything about that. As for “AFPAK,” its doomed from the very beginning and India should stay out of the whole mess. I suspect that’s why Holbrooke made the visit last week. Akbar makes eminent sense here-

Washington has a single dimension definition of “moderate”: anyone who stops an active, immediate war against the US is a “moderate”. Let me introduce him to a couple of “moderate Taliban”. They are now world famous, having been on every national and international news channel these past few days, stars of a video clip from Swat. Two of them had pinned down a 17-year-old girl called Chand Bibi, while a third, his face shrouded, lashed her with a whip 37 times on suspicion of being seen with a man who was not her father or brother.

Obama should record the screams of Chand Bibi and play them to his daughters as the “moderate” music to which he wants to dance in his Afghan war.

Then there was another edition of the daily political theater on TIMES NOW. Dileep Padgaonkar and Harish Salve proved their naiveté by asking how is it that the two major political parties cannot come up with a 1000 “non-criminal” candidates among themselves, or something to that effect. The Scindia scion proved that he is a great politician – the Congress couldn’t contain its glee while it was berating Varun Gandhi for his hate speech, but when Goswami asked him why it had not taken a position on the man-who-hasn’t-learnt-his-lessons-yet’s – Vaiko’s – threat of a “bloodbath” if the Tamil terror outfit chief Prabhakaran was hurt – he criticized-but-did-not-criticize. I think I now know which scion Ramesh Ramanathan was referring to when he wrote this-

After the Mumbai attacks, we saw many states going to the polls. I have seen some of the post-poll interactions among senior politicians, both winners and losers. One was with a political scion. This young parliamentarian told me disparagingly, “Your columns with their elegant ideas, all the media talk about a new wave of development and governance—all romantic nonsense. We are still working the same political equations on the same age-old formulae. I can show you one district where I spent months bringing development to the areas and we won just one seat. And another district where we played the most cynical form of electoral politics and we won a majority of the seats.”

I sincerely hope that Mayawati becomes the next Prime Minister of India – only then will the Indian people, and all the crooks running around come to know where their policies and politics takes them. “Louis XVI” and the “Queen of Hearts” will make a nice pair – the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest democracy can go down the drain hand in hand.