The Politics Of Negotiation
Now it’s the turn of Jodhaa-Akbar.For allegedly hurting the sentiments of someone or the other, it is getting banned in state after state.The ban has become so glibly used that today it seems to have become a routine part of our lives.The electric aura around a banned book or film has disappeared altogether for today anything can be banned for virtually any reason.Gather ten people, break a couple of windows, get a television channel on the spot and, presto, you have created a national outrage.Soon you will have a vocal representative of your cause butting heads with other talking heads in righteous discussions.You will be famous briefly before the next film hurting the next set of sentiments rolls along and you become pass.
This is the time for homeopathic outrage.We live in a world where television amplifies and universalizes any minor appearance of disorder.The camera magnifies what it zooms in on and converts that into the sole version of reality.What lies outside the frame lies outside our consciousness.So Mumbai was burning because of Raj Thackeray when in fact nothing much happened on the ground.Just as apparently UP cannot take the cataclysmic after effects of Jodhaa marrying Akbar on screen.
The biggest underlying changes lies in the response of the state to these provocations.Today, there are no absolutes that the state lives by, no overriding principles that it will not negotiate.It is easier to bend to the alleged will of the people than to stand up for any abstract principle.The market has reached here too, in that everything has the sir of a deal that can be calculated and optimized.So when there is an expose about Gujarat, the Congress keeps quite because it would hurt its electoral prospects.Likewise, no one in Maharashtra really wants to go up against Raj Thackeray’s cause lest it translate into an electoral disadvantage.The left, for all its posturing, is happy to banish Taslima Nasreen, firing the gun off the Centre’s shoulder.
In a post-ideology world, politics is metamorphosising into the marketplace for power.All considerations hover around the immediate and the local.The political discourse has got fragmented to such an extent that larger perspectives have no real place in it anymore.Coalitions have to be cobbled together, interest groups need to be aligned.This is possible only if all larger variables are removed from the equations.Principles call for an unreasonable adherence to one’s beliefs and extract a price for sticking to these.This is a price most parties are simply not willing to pay.
It is easier ti ban films than to stand up for an abstraction called the freedom of speech.It translates into no votes and hence it utterly dispensable.As someone has pointed out, democracy in India, has become exclusively about elections.I a larger sense, our world is being re-configured into an overlapping set of markets.The political markets has aligned itself around power just as the media market is intensely intent on eyeballs.In both cases, larger ideological considerations become expendable.So it serves the media to magnify sensations and for state to react expediently.
The absence of any pillars of belief frees the political system and allows it to negotiate endlessly with circumstance.Ideals are arrived at calculatedly and principles are selectively adhered to.Expectations from the political system are so low that no one really expects otherwise.The elimination of the lofty from the political discourse has made it stronger; more supple and pliant, ready to seize whatever local advantage that comes its way.That is the irony; we have created a self-sustaining system predicated on a studied lack of any larger beliefs.
