Exit of Shivraj Patil is a manifestation of the problem not a solution.....
The country heaved a collective sigh of relief hearing the news of our Home Minister having resigned. If one reads the media reports which explain the build up to this resignation, it appears that the ruling party or the PM had not asked him to put in his papers, in other words no proactive action was intended by them even after such a huge disaster. He was rebuffed and sidelined which prompted him to hang up his boots.
One thing which I fail to understand in this whole saga is that where does the buck stop for accountability in a parliamentary democracy. Is the Home Minister not answerable to the cabinet or the PM? If yes, then why should the cabinet or the PM not be held responsible for the lapses on the part of the Home Minister? Why should the government as a whole be allowed to go scot free, when they repeatedly failed to take action or corrective measures in the past when our Home Minister was not living up to their expectations. Removal or resignation is not a solution to this problem, and in any case he was a part of a team that was collectively responsible for governing the country. It is the duty of other team members and most importantly the team leader to ensure that all team members are performing their jobs diligently. Unfortunately, here we are talking about our cabinet and the PM and not just any team or team leader, and the responsibility to maintain law and order and to ensure security of the country is not just any job. If there was a widespread recognition even within the ruling party, which is now evident from the statements being made by various leaders that the Home Minister was a soft leader and not competent to man the post that he was holding, why did those people did not speak up earlier. Why did all these people choose to keep silent and instead waited for him to own moral responsibility? Shouldn't all these people be also held responsible for the acts, actions or lack of actions on the part of the Home Minister.
The question that we need to find an answer to is that whether it was Mr. Shivraj Patil the person, who could not deliver because of his personal failings, or would anybody else in his shoes also have met up the same fate? If the former is true, then the act of keeping silent by the PM acquires more seriousness, and if it is the latter then we need to find the problem areas and resolve them instead of vilifying Mr. Patil.

Resilience.....?

After any terror attack on any city the buzzword always is the resilience of the city and its people to spring back to normal life. I am really keen to understand the true meaning of this word which is used so very often to describe the resumption of normal routine activity by terror traumatised city and its people. As per the Oxford dictionary, resilience is the 'ability to readily recover from a setback'. Do we really think that the people of these terror struck cities readily recover from the setbacks in terms of loss of life, livelihood and sense of security, or do we lure ourselves in to believing that they have recovered because they resume life's mundate routine. Readily recovering from setbacks and a resumption of mundane activities of life should not be confused with each other. Resumtion of so called normal actities at the most can be attributed to lack of options. You need to feed the family, after all...

I live in a metropolitan city myself and we saw terror attacks in the recent past in the city. We saw the bloodshed, the gory details of how and where people were blown to bits, but still did not take even a day to resume our normal life again. This is not because we are insensitive, but because we are convinced that there is no solution to this malaise within the existing system. We as a people actually do not even expect something concrete or tangible from the system to ensure that the security apparatus is not punctured again and innocent lives are not lost again. We have completely forgotten being taken care of by the government, and have actually turned in to a very impassive society. We have to learn to expect from the government again. It is only then that we should be disappointed or feel let down and think of doing something to change the system, its response to such a man made calamity, and its failure to rise to the occasion and deal with crisis. We need to learn to feel and speak up our mind, and speak our mind in such a way that we are heard.

Friday, November 28, 2008

Bombay Burning
I have been watching extremely disturbing and horrifying images of our jawans from police and security forces fighting an unknown enemy for the last three days now. My heart goes out for all those innocent people who have lost their lives without any fault of their's and for those who have lost their near and dear ones.Today the whole nation is shocked and repulsed and apparently stands united but we know it as a fact that the collective memory of public is supposed to be very limited and in this country it is surely much below world average. In the recent past also we have been witness to many a terrorist attacks in quick succession in various cities and towns in this country but they are or have become just news items for most of us and life goes on as if nothing ever happened. People who lose their lives become a subject of discussion in drawing rooms or over drinks and that's where most of us end our reaction/action. People don't seem to get moved by anything over here long enough to push them in to taking some tangible action to force the government to change the way they govern.It is absolutely right that we get the leaders we deserve and we are actually being today governed by leaders who are representative of a morally corrupt, indifferent, insensitive, self seeking and brutally competitive society. Whenever there is a crisis we all start talking about the systemic problems that our society is faced with. The media especially various TV channels start falling over each other in pointing out what is lacking and what needs to be corrected. However with utmost disappointment I have to say that they forget about all the systemic rot as soon as they stumble upon a new breaking news. They very clearly seem to be only in the business of selling news and have no long term plan to ensure that enough information and awareness campaign is launched to take any issue raised by them to its logical conclusion.Another aspect I thought needs mention is that when we speak about the inadequacies in any system or any institutional framework we convenientally forget the people who man these systems/frameworks. We might improve our systems but we will get no where until we as a society change. At the end of the day it is not only the system but the people who are responsible for making the system work that would deliver. Therefore the problem before us is not unidimentional.We can say it with a lot of conviction that all political parties in this country are the same and largely made up of same profile of people and shall unfortunatelly continue to be the same till the feeders of these parties. that is the society, takes up the challenge as a whole and shows some willingness to change themselves. We need to be less indifferent, less insensitive, less inactive, less self seeking and a little less inert at individual levels before we expect something dramatic to happen and if we really want things to change for better in this country.