“Saar, I have lost 2.3 lakhs to win this election, I am in debt now. If you issue checks directly to the beneficiaries, I won’t get a penny. Please, let me bring them to you so that I can extract some commission from them……….”
This was a honest admission and a request from the Gram Panchayat member to me. I was issuing checks at the doorsteps of the beneficiaries of various schemes thereby denying the honourable members of the Grama Panchayat their share of flesh.
The root of the problem lies in the election process. A member bribes his way to the Panchayat, Assembly and the Parliament.
Look at the paradox:
In the Middle East people are protesting against the despots, dictators and monarchs to bring democracy to their nations, and in India, the largest and most vibrant democracy in the world, elected representatives are selling their own people, resources, morals and the country itself for the money.
Democracy has become a setup run by the money, for the money and off the people.
So, what’s the difference between a King and his coterie and a PM and his cabinet? they are there to amass the wealth at the cost of their own people.
It’s very shocking to read that our MPs bribed other MPs to buy the votes to win the 2008 trust vote for the UPA government.
We have seen politicians buying the vote by distributing cash to the people. We have seen MPs taking money to ask questions in the Parliament. Now we have cash for vote controversy, where they sell themselves to vote in the Parliament.
Whom to trust in this great democracy? people? officers? politicians? or 33 crore gods?
Now you will see the barrage of lies emanating from the accused. They are the holders of MLA (Master of Art of Lying) and MP (Master of Politics, here politics = corruption) degrees, if they don’t lie their career ends in democracy, and if they don’t indulge in corruption they can not win the next election.
Guess who was ‘interrogating’ the accused? It was Barkha Dutta, the accused in mediating the induction of great A Raja into the cabinet. It’s democracy, and it is India; anything can happen here.
An accused MP was telling the journalists that he was not involved and he doesn’t know any aide by the name of xyz. In few days you may read in newspapers that this xyz committed suicide.
Please read the Hindu (including last 3 issues) to understand the dynamics of our great democracy. Unfortunately,I feel vindicated by this because ever since I started this blog I am writing on corruption and how people from Gram Panchayat to Prime Ministers Office are systematically involved in the corruption.
Looking at all of this I suddenly feel that despotism or communism is better than democracy, but the truth is democracy is still the best option we have. We may have all these bastards eating up all the public money, but I am safe here, happy here. The democracy we have has been malnourished, it has been ill fed by us, we have an opportunity to strengthen it by involving ourselves in the nation building process by holding the people in offices responsible for their acts and bringing in a system where these can’t escape punishment anymore.
It’s a collective responsibility of our’s to peacefully but forcefully deny these sharks their share of illegal meat, we don’t need a revolution of the sorts that we witnessed in Middle East, we need people who are willing to question the system instead of sitting in their homes and chatting, we need people who have patience to initiate the fight against the corrupt and finish it to the end. We have all the laws in place, but we don’t have enlightened citizens who are willing to use these laws to their use.
