State vs Individual

A decade has come to an end since the turn of this century. How has Indian democracy evolved in the last 10 years? How far has it succeeded in doing away with its aberrations? Has the commoner’s level of trust in the system increased? Does he believe that the state is a welfare dispensation, at his service, with him all the time? How do the people relate to the democracy of which they are said to be the real masters? With whom is the system — ordinary citizens or politicians, bureaucrats (including police officers), criminals with politico-bureaucratic connections and the ones who wield money power? Whose is this democracy? These are very inconvenient questions. Those who have used the system to further their own interests (such as politicians, bureaucrats, criminals patronized and shielded by the former two, and the ones with money power) at the cost of those who should have been the first beneficiaries of the system (ordinary citizens with none to fall back on but the very system), would ask us not to raise such questions arguing that we have a functioning democracy, that the system is evolving, and that it takes time for any system to be firmly in place and deliver results. But this will not do. Sixty-two years of democracy is no joke, and yet we have many a Ruchika Girhotra across the length and breadth of the country, for instance, driven to suicide by an anti-people and corrupted system that serves only the rich, powerful and the influential. The wheels of justice never move for them, and even if they at all move, they are so slow that they make a mockery of the very quintessence of jurisprudence. The crux of the matter is that while lawmakers and bureaucrats are part of the system which they can manipulate at the best of their whims and fancies, while powerful criminal gangs are a requisite for most lawmakers due to which the goons find a cover in the system itself, and while the ones with sufficient money power can purchase anything from and exploit the system, the hapless hoi polloi suffer silently despite the much-celebrated democracy. But the equally pertinent fact of life is that there is no alternative to democracy. What is the option then?

The surge of the private media in the last decade, in sharp contrast to the Doordarshan days, has been a wonderful addition to our democracy. Their vigilantism, as reflected in campaigns like the one for Ruchika, has doubtless contributed to the people’s power — which is what democracy is all about. This must be sustained at any cost. What we often tend to overlook is the root of a genuine confrontation between the state or system and the individual in a democratic dispensation; the root cannot be outside of the democratic domain — the individual’s conflict with the system is due to the fact that the system has failed him despite the great democratic promise of a welfare regime. This system cannot be changed unless the people take the initiative to change it. What is encouraging is that the media have rallied behind the individual suffering at the hands of a cruel system. Let the coming decade be witness to a grand marriage of convenience between the media and ordinary citizens so as to take on a system that has made a hell out of innocent lives. Were it to happen, the new age of democracy would definitely come to the aid of the people of the Northeast too, sandwiched as they are between state and non-state players and thus highly prone to human rights violations of all sorts. However, the media in the Northeast must then mutate accordingly. One hopes it would happen. THE SENTINEL