Thank God, There are Enough Fools Around !

There are a lot of people, especially leaders of some political parties in India, who are thanking the Almighty for creating fools, dumb and stupid, who have only ears to hear bluntly and hands to execute recklessly but no brains to think wisely. Otherwise how can a party like, say for example the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), get people to support their fanatic ideas and indulge in sabotaging public property and manhandle people from outside states.

We Indians, who often boast about our supreme constitutional values, can only feel disgraced on seeing such divisive politics being carried out by rogue politicians who can hardly claim to possess any of the absolute qualities of an ideal leader. The brainless activists of the MNS bullied people from North India and terrorized a whole area after heeding to the outrageous tirade of their leader Raj Thackeray against people from outside the state of Maharashtra, particularly the North Indians. They did this without thinking about the fact that their brothers, sisters, uncles and friends would be staying in other states, and if the people of those states too think in the same chauvinist lines as they are thinking, their dear ones would also face the same fate as of those whom they are chasing down.

Things are not any different in our state Kerala either and we also, by God’s grace, are “blessed” with a huge pool of big fools. Or else how can one convince oneself about the large gatherings of people assembling at the grounds of the meeting place of all major and minor parties in the state. The ever increasing number of these people is not anything less than a wonder, even after accounting for the large number of people who attend these meetings for want of “Chicken Biriyanis” and Rs.250 per head that the organizing committee members of these party meetings provide these daily wages “workers”. (May be the rates are different these days as this may tend to fluctuate owing to the market forces of “demand and supply”, but the Chicken Biriyani always remains without any change, I reckon)

One of the gravest dangers of being an activist of a political party is that one would lose his individuality and initiative as one would be forced to align his ideas and views in uniformity with the ideas and views of his political party, or rather the party leader or leaders. All political parties strive to create a group of activists who are quite predictable and convenient to manoeuvre and who are less prone to use their innate intelligence to think and make opinions of their own which would perhaps contradict the decisions and views of the party itself. The ultimate aim of political parties in a democracy should be to make the life of individuals as good as possible by instilling in them a sense of initiative which would finally result in the development of intellectual and material assets of a society. But instead what the present day political parties are trying to do is to kill the initiative in its activists and thus creating a society where intellectual development is morbid and material development is but a remote delusion.

If we come back to the example of Kerala, it is a state reigned by the fools who idiotically follow whatever the leaders of their political parties say and never take the effort to think individually using their brains. If Pinarayi Vijayan issues a diatribe against some individual, then all members of CPI (M) and its allied organizations would reiterate the same diatribe in a way that would remind you of nursery kids repeating the rhymes that their teachers sing. When he once said that “media syndicate” is behind all the real and perceived problems in CPI (M), even the new kid, who has recently joined the SFI unit of his school and who hardly know what the abbreviation SFI stands for, started repeating those “sacred” words even in his sleep. When Ramesh Chennithala speaks in meetings, with his often-heard, ridiculously frivolous and repetitive political rhetoric, groups of fools, garbed in the Congress attire would applaud and would presume that whatever he says is the definitive truth and would believe that thinking about anything beyond his words is a sheer waste of time. The BJP hasn’t got the political power in the state to assemble their own group of fools in a large number as yet, but it is not at all absurd for them to carry such a hope and their opportunity would also come sooner rather than later.

It is high time for the emergence of a good political party system that would embark upon a new path of political activism where individual empowerment and societal enrichment are the basic objectives that they would pursue and would put chauvinist and other divisive politics to the backburner for the overall development of our nation. And it is time for the young generation of Indians to think and understand the fallacies of the political parties of the present political system and try to overcome its perilous implications by enlightened thoughts and progressive actions. Till that happens, the obnoxious and parasitic political parties would exploit the fools at their disposal and ruin this country with a detestable quote in their minds, which would read – “Thank God, there are enough fools around.”