By Tavleen Singh on January 6, 2013
The day after she died in that Singapore hospital, Sonia Gandhi and the Prime Minister went to receive her body at the airport making sure that ‘the people’ were kept away. They went in the early hours of a cold, dark and foggy Delhi morning and they made sure that the girl’s body was cremated before the thousands who had gathered every day at India Gate for nearly two weeks to pray for her discovered that she had died. The secretive, surreptitious manner in which India’s two most important political leaders behaved after an incident that caused national shame and horror showed their inability to understand the importance of leadership. It needs to be added here that the man who many believe will be India’s prime minister in 2014 did not show his face even once after the girl died.
So here are some questions. What kind of political leaders are afraid of the people? Why did the country’s biggest leaders not make any effort to talk to the protesters who gathered in streets that are five minutes from their homes? Why did the Chief Minister of Delhi only make an effort to meet protesters after they had been attacked by her policemen with water cannons and tear gas shells? She was booed when she finally showed up but what more did she expect? The political failure to respond empathetically to public outrage over the ghastly gang rape in a Delhi bus is not something that can be pinned on the Congress alone. It was a failure of the entire political class.
When the young medical student whose intestines were pulled out with an iron rod by her rapists was still struggling to live in Safdarjung Hospital, and thousands gathered at India Gate and Vijay Chowk to pray for her I waited every day for young political leaders to join the protesters. The Lok Sabha is awash with the daughters, sisters and wives of powerful political leaders and I thought at least one or two would show up to join the protests. The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha is a woman who has demanded the death penalty for rapists so I thought she would come for political reasons if not out of real pain. There are influential women Chief Ministers who have also made a huge noise about harsher sentences for rapists. They were in Delhi for the National Development Council meeting while the protests were still going on, and it would have helped them politically to make an appearance but they did not come either. Why?
Ask yourself these questions and the only answer that will come to you is that our political leaders are so removed from the people that they do not understand their own political interests any more. As someone who has spent more than three decades wandering about India covering elections and other political events I have noticed this disconnect grow and spread only since hereditary democracy became the norm for most political parties. In the old days when I covered election campaigns, it was normal to see important candidates travelling about on foot or in humble transport. I have personally seen two former Prime Ministers, VP Singh and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, campaign door to door in the 1980s but ever since political heirs began to populate the benches of the Lok Sabha this practice has stopped.
Political princes and princesses are a new breed of politician. They are unused to the dirt roads and grime of rural India so they travel in expensive air-conditioned SUVs wherever they go and this mode of transport is usually enough to distance them from the people. But, if they go on to become Ministers, Chief Ministers or important leaders in their own right, then the distance is compounded by ‘security’ concerns. Then they take to descending upon villages in helicopters that land in dusty fields where cavalcades of ambassador cars filled with commandos await their arrival. It is in these cavalcades that they travel to election meetings or political events. Then as soon as the meeting ends they vanish into the skies. Their contact with ‘the people’ is limited to meeting rural officials. It is an unhealthy and ugly transition that has occurred in Indian political life and it manifests itself more and more these days because in the cities people are not ready to put up with absent political leaders anymore.
In a crisis they want to see their leaders do what they elected them to do — lead. Like the girl who was raped and killed they are filled with modern ideas. The girl thought, like modern city girls do, that it was safe to go and see a late evening show in a cinema and then take a bus home. And, those who came to protest against her gang rape think like modern young Indians should that they have a right to demand law and order from their leaders and that they have a right to demand answers from them when they fail to provide it. The protesters who gathered in the streets of our cities to mourn the girl talked openly to television reporters about the need for the criminal justice system to improve. They expressed resentment against the huge deployment of policemen for VIP security when ordinary citizens could not be guaranteed safety.
These are modern ideas expressed by modern Indians who, unlike their rural brethren, are no longer prepared to put up with ineffective leaders or bad governance. The problem is that our political leaders seem unable to understand this. So the majority of those who spoke up for the girl did so from the safety of television studios. They talked in angry voices about the need for Special Sessions of Parliament to discuss a new rape law and for harsher punishments for rapists. In doing this they showed how very removed they are from reality. It is not new laws that are needed or harsher punishments. What we need is a Special Session of Parliament to discuss how a criminal justice system that is completely broken can be fixed before the whole structure comes crumbling down. What is the point of new laws when India has less than half the number of policemen for 100,000 people than the international average of 250? What is the point of new laws when a rape case can take decades to be decided in our courts?
http://www.niticentral.com/2013/01/we-are-no-longer-prepared-to-put-up-with-ineffective-leaders.html