Rise of the uncouth politician

Today, men in power - and, in case you havent noticed, it is always men - think nothing of assaulting someone, abusing them in public, or spreading outright lies about rivals. They accept this as part of what it means to be a politician in India, where th

Here are two things that happened over the past month alone that should have made us angry but didn-t do much beyond inspire a bit of outrage on Twitter. The first incident involved the son of a politician, who thought it perfectly okay to attack a civic body official with a cricket bat during a demolition drive. He didn-t apologise, obviously, because politicians and their family members are routinely trained to believe that they owe none of us anything, least of all an explanation.

When asked about why he did what he did, the young man claimed his party had taught him to "first request and then attack". If we were to all adopt that twisted logic, our jails would have overflowed a century ago.

Barely a week after that awful incident, a representative of another political party chose to do his own bit towards nation-building by visiting a stretch of the Bombay-Goa highway to see if the repairs carried out on it were appropriate. They weren-t, apparently, so the engineer responsible was taught a lesson by having buckets full of slime tipped on him. He was then roughed up and tied, presumably because if that doesn-t teach engineers how to do their job, nothing will.

Much has been written, said, and discussed on television about how our politicians now take for granted that winning an election automatically elevates them to a space far higher than the ground the rest of us walk upon. They have long believed that access to Parliament makes them rulers rather than representatives of the people, but it-s strange that 24x7 coverage and the unrelenting gaze of social media does nothing to deter them from their obnoxious conduct. At times, it seems as if these means of going viral encourage them to only do more.

I sometimes wonder if politicians were always badly behaved but managed to get away with it simply because WhatsApp and news television didn-t exist. After all, the chances of Doordarshan allocating prime time space to boors was as high as that channel questioning the government for failure to act upon its promises. Maybe they did behave this way within the confines of their homes, safe in the knowledge that being servile comes naturally to millions of us. And yet, I have trouble believing that.

Today, men in power - and, in case you haven-t noticed, it is always men - think nothing of assaulting someone, abusing them in public, or spreading outright lies about rivals. They accept this as part of what it means to be a politician in India, where the airing of dirty laundry is now a given and, the nastier the remarks, the higher their chances of being accepted by the masses. It says a lot more about who we are and what we have become though, because it is only our continued acceptance of this crassness that fuels it further.

There is no point asking politicians to behave better, take responsibility for their actions, or learn to communicate in a manner befitting the status we give them. We conveniently ignore the fact that being a politician in India is no longer about being a decent human being. It routinely attracts the lowest among us, those who have the money and clout to wrangle a ticket from a political party, those who have the wherewithal to beat numerous criminal charges, and those who have the requisite thickness of skin to wade into the muck and emerge unscathed.

What we should do is examine our own responses a little more carefully, to try and understand what these incidents do to those who witness them. Millions of us will simply shake our heads and move on, because we know that expecting things to change is futile.

What we fail to acknowledge is the message that is being sent out, to children, people without access to justice, and outsiders looking in. From their perspective, our silence condones these acts. We tell them we are okay with this because we don-t mind being treated as subjects rather than equals in our own democracy.

There have always been brave men and women who have stood up to this; ordinary Indians who have refused to be cowed down by elected representatives because they recognise that politicians serve us, not the other way round. We need to recognise that by allowing politicians to get away with their behaviour towards some Indians, we allow them to insult all Indians. Our silence is an act of disrespect towards ourselves.

When he isn-t ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

The views expressed in this column are the individual-s and don-t represent those of the paper

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