The Pied Piper and the Horde of Hungry Mice

 

Friday, August 25, 2017 earned its bit of dirty history. History by the way is concerned about its load only, good or bad doesn’t matter; these are our own interpretations to suit our purpose. So this particular day stands with its own load to carry down the ages: more than three dozen lives lost, hundreds injured, cars and vehicles burnt, media attacked and law and order shattered to pieces.

The moment Dera Chief Baba Gurmeet Ram Rahim officially turned just a rapist human, a common criminal, named Gurmeet, his followers, shocked and not able to digest this humanly avatar of the demi-god, went on rampage in Panchkula around the CBI court that pronounced the judgment.

They were crying, pelting stones, burning whatever came their way, getting tear gas into their eyes, got struck by sticks, and finally absorbed bullets as well into their bind faith. Pitaji, beloved father as they call him, should have been allowed to stay beyond the normal laws for common people, they expected. Well, faith has no limits by the way.

It’s however another matter that it took 15 years and 200 hearings for justice to find its way out of the quagmire. Well, that’s understandable given the ways of stalling justice in the country, especially in the case of the strong and the mighty. Nonetheless, better late than never, it at least keeps common man’s faith in judiciary alive. So equipped with the empowering instructions of the court, we can safely call him a rapist now and address him by his maiden name, Gurmeet, instead of adding the golden-weighted superlatives before and after.

First it was Asha Ram Bapu, followed by Sant Rampal, some Ramvriksha Yadav in Mathura, and so many others who come to light almost on a daily basis for their not so holy deeds. Godmen, in the manner they can hijack the common rules and regulations of the land, are beyond the state. They have their own zone of sovereignty.

Simply to beat your head about this particular Baba and the ones named above would be equal to shedding tears over just one of the symptoms of a bigger malady. The question isn’t about why this particular Baba came to acquire such a cult status so as to challenge the state itself. It will be more pertinent to ask, why such Godmen are born in India. Every street, every locality, every village, town and city has its group of influential Godmen who dispel the evil, fetch the best of boons, destroy your enemies, get you what your hardest efforts could not and make you the luckiest person on earth. Your hard work, your perseverance, your education, skills and your penance for a cause coming at the bottom of the list required to get success or attain your goal.

In a country where there are billions squeezed for space, for a living, there are bound to be trillions of broken dreams, unmet goals and a huge galaxy of crowded aspirations. It’s plainly about people to resource ratio. More the people, the lesser the people to resource ratio, it’s simple mathematics. Life is robbed of living and a sinister struggle ensues. More fights, fewer smiles, seas of tears and deserts of unmet dreams.

In the muck of survival, all this comes down to be taken as being lucky or unlucky, while in reality one’s failure to achieve something is simply an impersonal, neutral denial on the scale of probability in a scene where hundred hands are trying to get one chapatti. Now, who get it and who don’t is beyond the laws of skill and logic. The 99 left out people, or 98, 97, 96, 95 or still less, on the basis of how many hands tear away a bit of the chapatti, have every reason to believe, on the basis of their effort, that there is some well-placed scheme as per the laws of pre-determination that has dislodged their chances in the grab game. They feel the lock of their kismet is jammed and the key has been cast somewhere into the unseen depths of the cosmos. Here come our pseudo-mystics. They claim to have the powers to find your key and open the age-old jammed, rusted lock to let loose a flood of fortunes. So out of the billions, with trillions of shattered dreams, millions go in groups to throw themselves at some holy feet in their respective regions.

Out of the trillion shattered dreams, millions are in anyway, due to the lifelong and the still ongoing struggle to survive, at the point of hatching some long-aspired fruit. Even the most skewed law of probability will give chance to millions out of trillions. The moment the chicken is hatched, which would have happened in any case irrespective of Baba x, y, z or no Baba at all, the Baba grabs the credit by default. The mathematics accumulates the load of appreciation, subtracts the unmet aspirations almost negligibly as the irremediable fruits of the sins of past life. The Baba has no onus to prove. He can take just the credit for the million savings out of the trillions of broken dreams.

In any case, one minus from Baba x means one plus to the followers of Baba y. It keeps on shifting till the hatching takes place either in this Baba’s court or that. The credit goes to the last Baba where the poor poultry cock or hen is caged with at the moment when at long last the trail of his/her drudgery has at least left some mark on the stage of life. However, it appears like a straight blessing instead of the fruit of efforts. People have abandoned hope by that time, despite all the continued hard work and pursuit of goal, and view the fruit of their own effort as the star of luck fetched by some Baba’s blessings.       

Beyond the trials and tribulation of a terribly overpopulated society, where deprivation is bound to prevail given the skewed people to resource ratio, there are other factors that boost a cult-man’s chances to acquire superhuman clout, wealth and influence.

The caste system in India means a major part of the society has been treated as subhuman species for thousands of years. This inherited poverty, deprivation and low socio-economic standing leaves a huge mass of people who, their fathers, father’s father, and so on, have been ill-treated like they are mere goats and pigs. As the casteless and creedless mass of a Baba’s followers, they feel equal like anyone else around. They feel like a full human being instead of mere fractions across the ages.

Like long drags on Bidis make them forgetful of the miseries of life, the visits to congregations and gatherings at ashrams make them feel unyoked from the heavy burden of the caste they carry. A low caste means you are low, always, it drones in your head, all the time. You are low, you are low, keep your head down, further low, smile even when he spits on your face, tweaks your ears, takes puns at you, flirts with your wife, leers at your sister, gives a kick at your poor ass to uplift his spirits, still you have to smile. You have to wear an unaffected mask, while the shitty life moves on.

Here, at the Guru’s feet, they put off their masks to get some fresh air. Now they become the real they. They cherish the taste of real self, un-lowed, unbound and untethered. Their crooked spines stretch to a new high. The slouching shoulders, the vestiges of lowness, square-up for some moments to feel like a bird getting its wings untied to fly. There is an ease like an unyoked beast of burden being allowed to run free in a pasture land. No wonder the followership crosses all limits in devotion and loyalty.   

Drunken husbands beating their wives and squandering away even their meager resources is the common most fact in the struggling section of society. Drugs and alcohol symbolize the worst form of evil to the poor women. No wonder, as the Babas at least ask their followers to refrain from drinking, the women feel they cannot have a bigger well-wisher. So you have miles-long queues of poor, condescending women, waiting to kiss the feet of the holy man, who is at least trying to make their men-folk quit drinking and correct their behavior.

Poverty has its alternate truths in a reversed world. When you decide to get healed just by the Baba’s touch, of course there will be some immediate improvement, which in any case becomes a miracle. It simply is Placebo effect. Psychologically you believe and the body responds positively. So the Babas shower healing blessings, the suffering masses have full faith in getting healed, and healed they get in some way or the other in the short term at least. It then becomes a necessity to keep the blessings going, no matter you keep taking medicines along the way, get treatment, spend money in hospitals, but once you decide that it is the effect of your Baba’s blessings, everything you do becomes a carrier, a mere instrument, of the holy man’s blessings.

The invisible, unknowable and unattainable God is too far. Convenience needs a Godhead nearby, whom you can see, touch his feet and kiss his robe. So the cult-men replace God. They are near and more effective than God himself. And people want their God to be nearer.   

At the management level, it’s primarily about money. Anything purportedly meant to do with religious financing is beyond the tax and revenue regime of the country. You just make a Hindu religious trust, you then govern your own financial destiny. The rules and regulations of India don’t have anything to do with this territory where all types of black, white, yellow and red money flow in unchecked torrents. And where there is unaccountable money, rest of the vices easily follow. With money you can easily become God.

You can keep people’s dreams alive by giving them only as much as a free lunch now and then. With your opulence and grand show, you can create stars in damn shitty famished eyes. It’s very easy to become the God of hungry, frustrated souls. There are millions to whom even a favor only to the extent of free weekend meals in a community feast is more significant than God himself. Money pulls the clout, it builds the loyalty. There is simply no other weightier factor. So with all the donations to religious trusts and gifts of land, gold, silver, dollar and rupees, beyond the pale of tax and revenue norms, within no time the Babas become super-rich. With money rest of the journey becomes very easy.  

Once they have billions of money with millions of cemented hungry loyalties around them, politicians come scavenging like dogs on dead bodies. Politicians are comfortable with mafia, murderers, smugglers, drug dealers and human traffickers, as long as they get votes for them.

The Rapist Baba has a long history of alliance with all the major political parties. A rape charge undertrial gets donations to the tune of crores of rupees by the Haryana government, the state’s ministers bow down to touch the Baba’s feet, the Chief Minister attends the Baba’s functions, what else the common people need to further convince themselves about the divinity of their father figure.

In every constituency the Baba has thousands of diehard supporters to whom matters of faith come to an end in the Baba’s thick beard. They are the ones who decide the winner and the loser during the state assembly elections. They donate money to the Baba, the Baba gives them some food and occasional shelter for devotional gatherings with the same money, the rest he uses in building a fleet of super-luxury cars and making movies in which he slays the evil as the messenger of God. The government makes his movies tax free so that the devotees feel flattered.   

A distant relative of mine fought the last assembly election in Haryana on the INLD ticket. However, the Baba, expecting a turnaround in his favor—he was facing a CBI inquiry—decided to go with the BJP. It was open support by the way. This INLD candidate lost by just 2 votes. He, belonging to the influential Jat community, who hold an arrogant clout in the social hierarchy, still cannot forget that night when he reached the poor house of an old man in his village. The old man was an OBC, lower in the caste hierarchy, but was rich in the number of votes. They were 8 in all in the little house. All would have been well, given the contestant’s dominant caste status and the fact that both parties stayed in the same village, and the OBC man being wise enough to know the adage, if you have to stay in the pond, don’t take panga with the crocodile.

It would have gone well if not for the fact that the poor family had eaten countless free lunches and dinners at the Baba’s dera, congregation halls, where frustrated females from the countryside get a chance to get out of the loops of patriarchy to have a casual fling, a paramour with some bites of free food. The numerous ashram branches, which purchased the followers’ loyalty apart from making Baba a symbol of God to them, served as one-stop point of entertainment, freedom, fling, food, frolic, faith and dignity.

With folded hands the old family patriarch, with tears in eyes, his voice shaking, said, “Chaudhri Sahab, you can kill us if you want, but we just cannot vote for you. It’s the order of our God.”

The poor Jat was defeated by two votes.

This is what makes the Babas like him so potent. Politically. And once you are so significant in the scheme of political things, the politicians of the land will even stoop so low as to touch the feet of a rape undertrial.

Only money can buy such loyalty. Make laws to stop religious funding that makes them mini-empires within the state. If you cannot do that, in greed of sheepish votes, then please stop cribbing about the Baba. There will be so many others following him.

Humanity Boiling in the Communist Cauldron

 

The more I read the facts and fiction of communist dictatorial regimes, the times when humanity faces a roadblock, the more I forget my own collective as well as personal pain here in India. I feel blessed to be born beyond the communist shadow. If God has been merciful enough not to cast you into a communist land in either this or previous births, then you have no right to ask for more. It’s already the best blessings from the Lord. It's a divine gift not to be born under the communist system. The biggest pains you feel in a non-communist regime appear like luxurious sprouts in comparison to the horrendous systemic tortures perpetrated on the masses under communist regimes.

So to me, as part of democracy, the smallest of gains look like the biggest boon. Not that democracy is perfect. It has its own sweet-sour set of nuisances. But these are lesser symptoms of non-fatal diseases like cough, cold, running nose, sneezing etc., etc. Communist dictatorship on the other hand is simply a terminator like incurable cancer. 

Mao Zedong: “Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer that we use to crush the enemy.”  

Unfortunately, the enemy is always at hand. It is most of the time one’s next door neighbor. There is so much hate and distrust. There is an ever-persistent enemy of the state. One line purged, you redefine the meaning of state enemy, and purge the second line. It continues like this, waves of purging arrive like Tsunami. No wonder Mao Zedong and Stalin slaughtered millions of their own countrymen. These regimes stand as the epitomes of hate culture. And when love rarely matters in an epoch, it stands as the darkest phase.

The communist ideology is an all-pervading fire that doesn't spare either good or bad. Intended to burn the evil, it stretches the definition of evil too far and turns fiery evil itself. It's a huge stone hurtling down the slope, squashing leaves, saplings, petals, thorns and all. A fire needs fodder to burn. The communist ideology needs hordes of victims to survive. There is an endless chain of imagined enemies and hence successive waves of purges.

It's human industrialization wherein people are turned into machines and cogs in the production line. Looking at the ways and means of the emerging international bully, I’m afraid, at the end of it, the human civilization, despite its efforts at capitalist systems, will perish as a mechanical society controlled by the communist system. Nonetheless, such cataclysmic end should not make me skip my enjoyment of life in a democratic system.

Very often I wondered how the communist dictators built cult status with millions of blind followers. Now I realize it's a simple technique. First they rob people of their faith, make them forget the intrinsic goodness in them, introduce them to mindless violence and blood-bathing thus turning them utterly atheist. However, we are genetically inclined to have faith. In the vacuum they plant their personality. Thus starts the cult of a dictator. State propaganda is used for the dictator's deification. And we have crazy, blinded masses, happy over having their God nearby. It’s sadistic deification where common people love their own wounds and injuries.

However, the communist edifice, which gets soaring high in the sky, outgrows its sustainability like cancerous propagation of cells. Too much of laws, rules, regulations and legalized forced discipline create a facade that rises too perfectly, but soullessly, to soar too high to sustain its elevation. It then crumbles because mechanical perfection rarely sustains. You need to have a humanistic soul to help any human endeavor sustain the onslaught of time. That's why communist societies crumble like a castle of cards. They simply crash after a time like it did suddenly in Russia.

China is rabble rousing boundary issues with all neighbors to retain its CPC dictatorship. Keep them believing that there are foes outside, who have committed crimes against the Motherland, and they will forget about their own irritation at the ruling party’s manipulation of their lives. However, there is a possibility that it will snap like the former USSR. The Soviet Russia went boom to bust from 1917 to 1991, 74 years of experiment, which was inevitably bound to fail. Let’s see how far China can manage the experiment that started in 1949. It has been 70 years. Even they may not have as much time as they think. Things may just crumble up, almost magically.

To survive, a society has to have its pitfalls and imperfections. The facade doesn't go too high. It sustains. There are plus and minus that cancel out each other, like in a democratic system. Oh, the glorious imperfections of democracy! That's why it thrives.

The well managed, rigid facade in China may disintegrate. It may suddenly collapse. Well, unless they voluntarily introduce some imperfections themselves, some traits of democracy, to make it pliable, some allowance of mischief, some humor, some criticism to bring down the upper stories of the facade that has gone too high. It won't fall then.

The communist model carries the seeds of its own destruction. Right now Chinese leadership has to have more and more enemies, real and imagined, to keep the people hooked onto the idea that has failed everywhere else in the world. Let’s see where such mass distrust of the humanity outside the boundaries of the latest superpower takes us.

Casteism: History’s Biggest Mass Exploitation

 

In India we have casteism as the history’s most obnoxious social system of mass exploitation of helpless millions for the longest period of time, for an astounding 2500 years in fact, and still going in many modern forms of the evil practice.

Elsewhere in the world you have the classes. There is fluidity in this system as Osho says. One can go from low class to high class and vice versa, but not so in the caste system in India. Once you are born in a low caste, your deprivation and disadvantages get stamped on your soul. It’s hardly possible to pick out a more evil practice where the soul is tamed to this abysmal level, where you rob dreams, love, peace and respect from the eyes of generation after generation of millions of your fellow human beings.

Beyond historical injustices and blunders, the issue fuels the Indian political system even now. Indian democracy is addicted to the system. The caste-based job reservation can make or break anyone’s chances. The issue is politically so sensitive that just an off-hand remark by the RSS chief was enough to decimate BJP's hopes in the last Bihar assembly elections. So nobody dares to touch the issue at the practical level. At least the lower castes hold this symbolic political power now.

The so called ‘lower castes’ have been systemically exploited for the last 2500 years in India. There is no doubt that they need institutional support to bring them into the mainstream. Not that the government cannot give them positive incentives in other forms. Reservation in itself is not the end. It is just one of the means to the end. However, in the present system of reservation there are flaws that need to be corrected if the real goal of Dalit upliftment is to be achieved.

I have seen three generations of elite Dalit families reaping reservation benefits to rise on the socio-economic ladder. Like someone’s father is a class one officer in railways. He raises his family comfortably in Delhi, provides best education to his children. His son, born, brought up and educated in Delhi, becomes a police officer. The police officer’s children born, brought up and educated in the best set up get reservation benefits to get still more elite governmental jobs.

On the other hand, I am surrounded by poor educated Dalit young people in the countryside who haven't benefited from reservation in any way. They have the qualifications, but in the fight within the reserved category, they are easily beaten by the elite Dalit families. So does it really serve the purpose? The cause is served if the reservation benefits spread horizontally across the social strata instead of creating vertical towers of prosperity in the same families where the reservation benefits pile up across generations.

The solution can be: Let reservation be a first generation benefit only, i.e., the children of a reservation beneficiary will not be eligible for the scheme anymore. When a Dalit gets a job on reservation, he/she is supposed to bring up his/her children in a way that they can compete against the best. It will help in spreading the reservation benefits horizontally to the other poorer Dalit families rather than the vertical compilation of benefits in the already rich Dalit families. Unfortunately it has been the trend so far. Job reservation is supposed to provide more and more people with basic amenities of life rather than some particular families reaping the benefits and get wealthy on account of the already existing benefits.

The New-age Democracy

 

Democracy, by modern day consensus, is the best—among others—form of governance. With some skepticism, it is agreed that it is best among the worst. It even appears so. But that doesn’t mean all is well with democracy. No system is perfect. Perfection is just a mirage. However, like all political systems democracy also can be better.

My main issue with democracy is with its propensity to rake up divisions to breed social disharmony, fanning the smoldering smoke to build-up a fire and then with a suave smile offer the solution on paper only and thus allowing the issue to stretch till eternity. Pitted against each other at numerous fronts, social cohesiveness, a must for collective compassion for humanity’s greater good, takes a backseat.   

My other reservation about democracy is the principle of same voting weight carried by all individuals as voters. The best and the worst carry the same political weight, at least as voters, when it comes to contributing to the process of selecting the most suitable representatives and hence the best government. Isn’t it ironical that in election as voters, the people who have been fatal to society carry the same political weight as the ones who have been of real help to the society? Shouldn’t the weightage of votes vary as per the contribution or potential of individual voters?

Under the present system of voting, Hitler, Stalin and Edi Amin, responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent lives, carry the same vote weightage as the healers of humanity like Gandhi, Vivekananda, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammad. Shouldn’t the people with proven records of being better human beings, having more understanding of the issues of common interests, have more voting power than the criminals, social degenerates and blood-shedders.

Common people, busy in the small domain of life to survive, carrying the good and bad in them, can have the value of one to their vote. The criminals, terrorists, law breakers and hate-mongers can have fraction of one in proportion to their crimes. And achievers and contributors in academics, sports, spirituality, arts, science and culture can have the multiple of one to their vote. The latter with their better selves, more awareness and more constructive nature will turn the game of democracy far more dynamic and vibrant than it is now.

Since the best and the worst just occupy a few minor edges on the fringe of society in terms of numbers, it will not shake the present system’s foundations immediately. But it will act as a system of reward and punishment for the majority to maintain and improve their political ratings. Who doesn’t want to grow? And certified more so. A better political rating on the basis of standing and achievement in life will look good on anybody’s CV. It will be as good as holding doctorate degrees, gold medals and mushy citations. A cut in the voting right, and the rating coming to a fraction of one, will add to scores of other deterrents that stop a person from going to the wrong side to be lesser of a human being in all its forms.

A voting right cannot be static. It cannot be frozen for all times irrespective of best and worst deeds of the holders. In case a person comes out worst, it should be abrogated altogether. In case of glorious achievement, the person should have multiple of one. It is a suitable political reward. It’s better to have a Hitler without any voting right and still more suitable to have Mother Teresa with multiple of one voting right.

The Election Commission has to make the voting right a bit dynamic with the possibilities of upgrade and degrade and even outright abrogation. It will save democracy from being the puppet of poor choices where masses, hardly knowing what they are voting for, barely knowing the issues involved, get swayed by selfish rhetoric and emotional rabble-rousing to elect pitiable leaders to power.

The differential voting rights will carry democracy to its next stage. The elected representatives will be better and people will have one more incentive to be better.

It will stop the politicians from digging into the foundations of society with their tools of hate and division. I just want a voter with a proven record of his loving compassionate self to carry multiple of one voting right. Shouldn’t a person, who has been planting trees for decades and has ensured that at least hundred trees survive to grow mature and big, be given at least two voting rights? This is just one example. There are scores of other small time feats that have a huge impact on the health of our main home, mother earth. Isn’t it high time that democracy now turns new-age to help build vibrant, robust, open-minded societies?   

Trimming the Hedge to Maintain the Power Center

 

Political extremists (both left and right) and religious fundamentalists try to change the masses for the worse. They play cards to cut down the people to a fraction of their potential and you have nice governable puny-heads. They serve meow meow for instant gratification. Hate, phobias, pseudo-greatness, anger and jealousy are very convenient tools to rob someone of sanity and get cast as a hallucinated pawn in the power game.

The power hungry—individuals, groups, political parties, governments and institutions—try to disempower the masses. It cannot be otherwise. The power pyramid has few strong characters at the apex and weak masses at the base. It can never be a square, having people of the same realized potential from top to the bottom. Those ambitious for power can never think of empowering the masses. In that case the pyramid loses its standing.

With pseudoism and populist rhetoric, they rob the masses of the balance of their judgment. Hate does it. It tilts you off the balance. You fall prey to a peculiar weakness. You become lesser of a human being. The power monger’s ambition draws on the peoples’ weakness of judgment. They try their best to keep the people nearsighted to tame them in a narrow sphere, with unrealized potential, from where the launch-pad of wisdom is too far. The biggest loss is when people tend to lose faith in love, peace and harmony as the mass-managed dark cloud of hate, anger and distrust builds up.

It draws votes for the power hungry. In the day to day life, however, it is paid in terms of racial attacks in America, brutal killings by Islamic extremists, attacks on Africans in India, and scores of incidences when people pick up hate and run after each other.

Quite ironically, power politics is just the butter churned out of the milk of social disharmony.