THE REALITY OF INDIA

SUNNY THOMAS

There are three kinds of reality: reality, reality of reality, and media reality. Philosophers, excuse. We are not talking about the ultimate reality, which they alone seem to know. We are talking about Planet Earth!

Reality, understood correctly, is the perception of people. Hence the reality on Planet Earth is the sum-total of all reality, as perceived by the inhabitants of the living planet. But, of course, there is an Arab reality, an American reality, a Euro reality, and an Asian reality. What’s an Arab reality but to jettison Israel into the Arabian Sea? What’s an American reality but Brand Walmart Super Ego? The Euro reality is built around euro and its endemic troubles, and Asian reality ‘We can and we will’ sort of stuff.

Reality of reality are things we don’t like to talk about but haunt us all the time – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, al-Qaida. And media reality is the hype and hoopla with which television channels play their TRP game, and the fair-tale sensationalism with which newspapers spellbind their gullible readers. Media reality is never the reality but at best a window to reality.

Once again the UP elections have proved the reality of India that we vote our caste every time we cast out vote. Caste started as division of labour to achieve economic efficiency in a feudal society, which also provided a semblance of security in its consolidation. Remember, the millennia-old feudal mindset cannot be changed by a few election rallies!

Rahul Gandhi did the same mistake which his father Rajiv Gandhi did in 1989 – to go it alone. History repeats itself because what history teaches is that man learns nothing from history. By forming a rainbow alliance, Atal Behari Vajpayee turned the most untouchable party into the most respectable party of India. If our comrades did not allow Joyti Basu to become prime minister in 1996, they made the historic blunder of not turning CPM into the most respectful party of India in place of BJP.

There are golden moments in history, which if you let go, slip out of your hand for ever! Rahul and Rajiv are/were novices in politics. Both seemed to suffer from the illusions of grandeur that the Nehru-Indira legacy breeds, forgetting that Nehru was on the vanguard of the Freedom Movement, with a martyr’s appeal having faced lathi-charge and gone to jail several times, and Indira rowing up in the lap of the Father of the Nation and forming her own monkey brigade, while the dynasty’s children have nothing more to offer than their surnames and good-looks!

As talent cannot be taught but only fine-tuned, political acumen cannot be transferred. Either you are born with it, or you don’t have it in you. Robust common sense is what is needed in politics. In a land where a Yadav will vote for a Yadav, and a Bahuguna for a Bahuguna, and an OBC for an OBC, the virtues of a western education – even the best of it – will fall flat faced with a feudal electorate. To his credit, Akhilesh Yadav was able to hide his western education under the saffron cap and party outfit.

Indian voters are indeed one of the most intelligent species on earth. They vote for relevance. We often hear city-bread, foreign-educated media comedians throwing up their hands and declaring the electoral verdict is very confusing. To a confused mind, intelligent signals are confusing. They represent the paranoia and the apprehensions of a people struggling to exist – living under conditions of humiliation and fear of torture by the brute leviathan of the government machinery.

To the prime minister living in Delhi, GDP and Moody rating are important, and so are commonwealth games and Olympic Games. But to the poor farmer of Andhra and Vidharbha, the price of pesticides is important because even committing suicide is becoming expensive by the day.

As the reality of the farmer is his crop, and the reality of the unemployed the job, and the reality of those stuck in grinding poverty the debt-trap, let it be known to the czars and czarinas of our time, that the reality of sixty per cent of our population is nightmare!

The moral of the story is those who do not understand the matrix of feudal India should not enter politics, which does not mean Rahul Gandhi will not be prime minister in 2014.