It’s not as if I did not see it coming over the terrible six weeks of campaigning and voting that revealed the sickness at the heart of India. It is a long time to reconcile oneself to the fact that certain things in our country have changed, perhaps irrevocably, and not for the better. The low level of public discourse certainly, from practically all parties, but the loudest and most strident notes coming from our rulers. Nothing seemed taboo; outright lies, misinformation, photo-shopped videos, slander, shocking vulgarity, sexism of the worst kind, threats, vile claims, you name it, this election season to vote in the 17th Lok Sabha.
Since 1951, when 53 parties fought to be voted in by 173 million people, of whom around 45 percent actually voted, to 2019, when 900 million people registered as voters and more than 460 parties were in the fray, what a long way we have come. And how much we have learned about ourselves, not all of it complimentary. Our tolerance levels for each other’s presence and for each other’s ideas has slipped dangerously, even as our tolerance for our leaders has grown to embrace the worst behaviour. It is as if we judge them by a completely different yardstick from the one we use to judge each other. Nothing seems to matter, and party manifestos are a joke. Not agrarian distress, not water shortages or farmer’s suicide, not the fact that our education and health systems are teetering on the edge of an abyss, or that unemployment levels are among the worst ever in our 70- year history. What the people of India are most bothered about is national security, as if we are under threat, the bogie of the loss of Kashmir, the threat to Hinduism from the minorities either through increase in numbers or through conversions, and the loss of our massive cattle population to the eating habits of the same minorities.
This gives the increasingly savage lumpen elements within the majority community carte blanche to wreak havoc on innocent Indians who are either strangers in a neighbourhood or have the wrong names or are just seen as the ‘other’. Having established what really floats our collective boat, and given the sweeping, triumphal nature of the exit polls we were subjected to earlier in the week, I decided it was pointless following the results too closely. So here’s what I did. I went to church (yep) and prayed for the well-being of India. Then I went for a walk and met friends and chatted. No-one talked politics. At all. Back home I had breakfast and embarked upon a round of house cleaning. Then I bathed, came out and cooked, had lunch and watched Netflix and Hotstar. I napped for a bit, read, resisted looking at my phone, rejected most calls, did not look at all at Facebook or Twitter, thought about getting off social media completely, but decided that for my line of work, this could be an actual drawback. But I can certainly do without Zuckerberg. Around 5 pm, I checked my phone for the results. It’s going to be a long, hard five years with lots and lots of work to do.
