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| Politics should not loose sense | | | For last few days there has been a breathless debate on the television channels and seamless so in the print media on who politicians behaved after Mumbai tragedy. It is a reflection of the disorientation and disconnect of politics from the sentiments of the people that some politicians have reacted in a most insensitive and gross manner to the Mumbai terror attacks and the popular response to it. Politicians from across the spectrum have been guilty of gross statements, comments in poor taste and inappropriate conduct and so they cannot be dismissed as stray remarks of lone indivividuals with a deficiency of comprehension and decorum. It is true that the easy access to electronic media has made the popular anger against politicians more visible, but the genuineness of the discontent and even the contempt for politics is not unreal and made-up. The cumulative negative attitude to politics, fed by its degradation through corruption and concern for public interest, have found a focal point where a threat to people’s lives, arising from a failure of security, has coincided with a perceived failure of politics.
Even a seasoned politician like Kerala chief minister Achuthanandan, whose strength has always been his ability to relate to people even across hard party lines, stooped to disrespect the dead and insult the living; he failed to realise that the person whom he had hurt was a father who had lost his son, while he was a mere chief minister. He rightly apologised for his discourteous words, but unforunately late and probably under pressure. A BJP leader dismissed the spontaneous expression of grief and protest last week as the actions of “women with lipstick and powder on their face”. A chief minister conducted a terror tourism trip of the scene of attack with film personalities in tow and a home minister felt that the most audacious terrorist attack in the country was “a small incident’’. The common thread running through all these is the inability to understand the public importance of events and the ways in which they impact private lives, compounded by the lack of a sense of propriety. Politics is the organising scheme of democratic life and if it loses its responsiveness and public character, it becomes hollow and farcical. The many responses in the last few days have shown up politicians as cynical, egotistic, narrow-minded and unable to comprehend situations and empathise with the people. Time has come when leaders start realizing their responsibilities and understand that how quickly they isolated from public when they fail in proper responses. |
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