Why don't you know where the country is going, Mr Mukherjee?

A visibly upset Pranab Mukherjee, the senior most Congress politician had this to say soon after a citizen slapped Sharad Pawar in New Delhi on Thursday: “I don’t know where the country is going”. He had a scowl becoming his ire as he walked to his official car from his office. I wish it were as simple as that. It is hard to believe that it was merely rhetorical. It is equally hard to believe that being in the perch he is on, next only to Manmohan Singh but swinging more clout than anyone else, a notch below on the establishment ladder, he does not know where this country is going. [caption id=“attachment_140843” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Take your head out of the sand, Pranab-da. PTI”] [/caption] It seems Mukherjee and his peers, down to the gram panchayat politics are hiding their head, ostrich-like, in the sand. The common man, as represented by 27-year-old Harvinder Singh, seems to know where the country is heading. That slap was apparently, not personal, because Harvinder Singh and Sharad Pawar did not even know each other. It was symbolic of the outrage of the helpless man on the street. At that time, to Singh, Pawar was emblematic of the political class. The country, the common knows, has gone to scamsters, to politicians who use democracy as a veil to perpetuate their misdeeds which ranges from building family empires, buying up constituencies, strengthening their own money-making apparatus often passed off as legitimate businesses, to a subversion of democracy where the common man is allowed no role except to periodically cast a vote. But Mukherjee and his tribe have refused to heed the signals which have been emanating from the streets for about past six months. There is a marked tendency, Mukherjee ought to know, that people have begun to doubt the value of a vote if it only leads to the kind of grasping political class to which ideology is a ruse, to which the laws are only a pretence, to which the next goal is another re-election to ensure its perpetuity. Sadly, democracy as practiced is driving people away from their earlier faith in it. That slap repeatedly played out mercilessly on the 24x7 news networks is perhaps a big notice to the establishment that things have come to a pass where people have had enough. To use part of Kiran Bedi’s tweeted response, it was all to do with the ‘pent up anger’ which has to find a vent somewhere. Note the pattern. Suresh Kalmadi was the object of an attack on his way to the courts; he has been accused of embezzlement of public funds for personal gain. Sukh Ram was attacked because, this is my guess, it took years before justice caught up with him; it could have been impatience at the delay in punishing the man. Who knows, there are a lot many slaps unadministered yet and people may get temped to neutralise that backlog. It is best they are not offered that opportunity. Of course, a democracy does not have room for such assaults, for taking law into one’s own hands, to be violent when there are means of redress – a parliamentary system, a judiciary, an executive, a fourth estate. But what of them? The Parliament is hostage to the tendency of scoring political points, not making judicious laws; the judiciary is a slothful entity where justice is not easily found, the executive is compromised – you can’t expect a policeman not to ask a bribe – and, the media, severely compromised with its penchant for trivia and paid news. What recourse does the common man then have? With elections far away in 2014, with the country brimming with big-ticket corruption cases, with inflation on fire because the common man believes it is all to do with poor or no governance, the streets are an inviting theatre for all action. The Arab Spring has not been a mean contributor to the Indian Citizen beginning to think that there is a way out, after all. Pranab Mukherjee, in his de rigueur winter wear bandh gala, a signature of Delhi politicians was wrong on one point. Harvinder Singh’s slap on Pawar’s left cheek did not deserve any publicity, he said, in utter contempt of the action. But publicity is what it would get because the media wittingly or unwittingly hyperventilates on behalf of the people because the latter like it. Because they like it, the TRP’s go up. Yes, Anna Hazare is not exactly a reticent man and is not given to discretion and has a past of having used strong methods to get people to reform and characteristically, despite the Gandhian halo woven around him – part self-proclaimed, part ascribed – could not resist that ‘One slap?’ reaction. He has an animus against Sharad Pawar but walk the Facebook Diaspora and you’d find utter justification for the slap. One went to the extent of wanting to covert November 24, the Thanksgiving Day in the US into India’s Slapping Day and one does not need much imagination to guess who he had in mind as objects: the politicians who brought the country to this pass. The least Mr Mukherjee can do is retain his scowl and help redeem his community of politicians of this stigma of the most unwanted call in this country at this point of time. It would, of course, be harder to reform his tribe than ask the people to change. Which means, while politicians and others rush to rightly commiserate with Pawar and condemn the slap, few, if any, have said they understood why it happened.