‘Why people keep electing idiots?’

Thursday, May 23 is a special day for India. It will be on this day – today – that the outcome of the 17th Lok Sabha election will be out. Meanwhile, people across the country, irrespective of whether they subscribe to any political party or not, are waiting anxiously to know which party or alliance actually comes out as the ultimate winner. The past few days have been exciting, especially after several TV news channels and other agencies had released the results of exit polls they had conducted. While most of the exit polls have indicated a clean sweep of the elections for the BJP, the Opposition Congress party and its allies have refused to accept the results of the exit polls. Abraham Lincoln had once said, “Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.” Lincoln probably was right. While it is the people who have cast their votes, why should the people crib when the results of the election does not match with their expectations. Yes, democracy is a game of numbers. And in India, a candidate polling 30 per cent of the total votes cast can also emerge winner in a situation where the remaining 50 percent votes get divided among nine or ten other candidates. Moreover, what has been seen in this election is that a sizeable section of the people had cast their votes on religious lines. If one party had whipped up religious sentiments in favour of one particular religious group, another tried to whip up passion for another religious group. And then, there was this cheap politics of bribing the voters with huge amounts of cash and other doles. Here comes in as relevant what Franklin D Roosevelt had once said, “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.” What kind of education does India want to actually make the citizens – voters – express their choice wisely and thus ensure real safeguard of democracy? What kind of education does a country with over 74 per cent literacy need, when a sizeable chunk of so-called educated people like teachers and government officers spit on the roads, urinate by the side of national highways and throw garbage into drains? Politics in India, as someone had said, is the art of using euphemisms, lies, emotionalism and fear-mongering to dupe average people into accepting—or even demanding—their own enslavement. Readers must be wondering why the headline of this editorial asks –‘Why people keep electing idiots?’ Well, that was the headline of a political analysis published by The Guardian, a British newspaper in the backdrop of the 2015 elections in the Britain, with the author saying that politicians have very poor reputation, it would, however, be foolish to assume every politician was like this. While the British newspaper also asserted that not all politicians were idiots despite the possibility of the definition of the word ‘idiot’ varying from person to person and situation to situation, the fact remains that plenty of them are. Otherwise, why do politicians differ from the common person in terms of utterances, acts, decision-making, attitudes, attire, body language, and so many other things? Or, is it a fact that the politicians think that all the people, particularly the voters, are also idiots who keep voting despite getting cheated every five years?