Witoubou Newmai
Sedition charges and arrests are rampant around the world today. In some cases, it is the people who rise to the occasion and in some it is the authorities. But in many more places, neither of the sides does the needful. But still in some places, peculiarities of the situations and unresolved issues, which are political, have been ruffling the ambience.
But the thing that one must not miss, if we are genuinely looking for a long term panacea, is about human ‘stories’ which tell us that pliant people are safe but dangerous. The ‘stories’ also tell us that the bigger the number of pliant people in a society, safer is the position of the irrational and incorrigible people in power. Inversely speaking, to make the number of the pliant people dwindle is to threaten the position of the irrational authority. As such is the case, people in power will invest energies to create “a durbar of yes-men” (Nilanjan Mukhopadhay’s phrase in quotation).
One must then ask as to why the number of that species—conscience keepers—has been dwindling. Many people today think it is “unwise” to express ideas and opinions. This trend has put our society in peril. This culture reminds us of the comment of Maureen Freely: “It was unwise to discuss Turkey’s minorities in public. Ideas could be crimes”.
Maureen Freely, who translated Orhan Pamuk’s voluminous The Black Book, expresses this in the afterword of the book.
Coming to our today’s society, ‘valuable’ people are not willing to express ‘valuable’ ideas and opinions. This may be because they are aware of the “crimes”, and they do not want to commit these “crimes”. As such, these ‘valuable people’ are devaluing their values. Thereby, these ‘valuable people’ continue to remain a travesty of public conscience keepers.
Let us step back and view things from a bit far.
When the raison de’etre of people is the power that is not for a mere power’s sake, we need to find out what that power-drive encapsulates. Definitely, it will encapsulate long term as well as short term programmes. The society’s duty is to find out whether the programmes are virulent. But that is not the most important part. In other words, the most important part lies not there where one makes the ‘discovery’, but it lies beyond. As such, the greatest challenge today for all of us is about our willingness or reluctance to go beyond the ‘discovery’.
The deficit of political participation by the people is also one area of the problem. This is to say that the hardships faced by our society today are also glaring signs of strained equations between the people and ‘concerned authorities’, who are unconcerned. Since this is the case, it is time to admit that our society is yet to deliberate thoroughly on the “proper form and scope of political participation as to who should represent whom and on what basis or who should participate and in what way” (David Held).
