Every election campaign despite being barren of hope is creatively fertile as far as conjectural discourses go. Parties offer misty visions of material prosperity that will have us all residing in penthouses cloaked by the clouds, and as we picture ourselves taking in the vista from our unique vantage point, we aren't worried about the foundations and the floors between us and the ground. The truly pessimistic will surely notice a fallacy: if everyone is living in a penthouse, will we have a panoramic view?
Among the enduring strains of electoral speech is the exhortation to save the country from communal forces and preserve its secular nature. As persuasive, divisive, and fear-mongering as this line of thought is, it does dissipate under the slightest scrutiny. A party that prefers the traditionally Hindu hue of saffron, if elected into government, will never the less have to abide by the Constitution. I am no Constitutional maven, but the Preamble while delineating the ideas that informed the authoring of our Constitution mentions the resolve to fashion a secular nation. As such, I guess, it would not be amiss to believe that sufficient safeguards and regulations have been woven into the Constitutional fabric to secure secularism. Unless your concern is not a fear of the so-called communal forces but cynicism about the provisions of the Constitution and their effective enforcement by the three pillars of our democracy, anointing a particular set of individuals our saviours is unreasonable. And if the cynicism is your concern, the election boils down to choosing leaders as per your faith in the virtues of a set of individuals, which is equally unsound. Humans, by nature, are corruptible, and hence the necessity for the safeguards of law and periodic elections. No seeming paragon of virtue is infallible, and if they were, and we were to choose them, we would have something similar to a theocracy. And, as experiences and experiments with theocracy from around the world prove, the assumption of infallibility is but an invocation of the greatest evil.
Preaching about the pivotal nature of secularism and coaxing voters to protect themselves from persecution that the secular parties can prophetically presage is to insult the intelligence of the voter. A democracy is premised on the presupposition of prudence in the people. If the citizenry can be trusted to see through the insidious and impractical promises of grandeur - be it of baseless material wealth, of the nation's resource-free rise to the table of superpowers, or of regional superiority seized using the sole ammunition of jingoism - published in the manifestos, we cannot be so naive as to not appreciate the threat represented by the much touted divisive forces. These repeated warnings about how we may succumb to the schemes of these forces and condemn ourselves to eternal social ruin are egregiously and jarringly paternalistic.
By all means, provide us with the context that will illuminate the intentions of contending political parties, not with a view to provide us with perspective but, if needed and possible, to widen it. Prescribing what we must do to preclude a phantom possibility that may come to pass is to inveigle us into a prison without any potential for progress. Every action has inherent risk, but to peddle an exaggerated vision of an intractable doom is only a design to petrify people from pursuing new prospects. We may know the devil well, and the angel may be a stranger, but isn't acquaintance with the ways of the devil the vary basis of our yearning for an angel? If so, should we flinch at what we see from the distance, a mere silhouette that may seem terrifying, the fear being ever amplified by speculative narratives, and squander the chance of having our lives bettered?
Of course, we, the people of India, will be saddled with the responsibility to be discerning, to have discrimination and determine our destiny. But isn't that what we have been clamoring for? A democracy?
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