Hail the Hoi Polloi

We are well into the seventh week post demonetisation. The winter session of Parliament has been shouted out. The queues outside ATMs have not thinned. The moment the cash van pulls up near the ATM and well before the ‘no cash’ board is taken off, the news spreads like wild fire in the neighbourhood and within minutes you find a sizeable queue outside the glass door.

The promised weekly quota of cash continues to be chimerical. Cable operators and newspaper and milk suppliers have not been paid off by the households for they could not give change for Rs.2000. No business establishment in fact gives change and insists that the purchase be made for more than Rs.2000.

In all this hoopla, we have failed to notice how our people have conducted themselves. Except for occasional outbursts of anger and frustration there has been no major incident. The queues have been orderly. People do have difficulties but they are abiding by rules of decency and decorum.

Marxist intellectuals have confided in private that during the heyday of the Soviet Socialist Imperialism they were cornered and repeatedly pilloried in all the international fora as to why despite with most ideal conditions, they could not bring about a revolution in India.  The Telengana uprising fizzled out to the chagrin but not disillusionment of our Marxist brethren.

This is a question most social scientists would be hard put to answer. Why with such disparities in income and life style and amid penury, the indigent Indian masses have tended to go about their business in a calm and dignified manner.

Is this because of the innate religiosity of the masses? The Marxist scholars squarely blamed the Hindu religious tenets, particularly the belief in Karma, for opiating the masses.

Home grown commentators have always stressed that in India crime has always been less considering the size of the population not because of Law Enforcement machinery but because of the native sense of Dharma.

The scholars with occidental optics and deracinated specialists might well come up with very impressive and eminently readable theses on the subject, but the phenomenon will always elude their grasp. The ultra liberal stranglehold on discourse in the media in the west obscured their senses to the massive groundswell of people’s discontent and disdain for politically and journalistically correct way to conduct the affairs. Be it Brexit or the victory of Trump (against the formidable lining up of media from Washington Post to New York Times), the pundits could not simply gauge the groundswell. Our own media moguls, fashioned in the best of Occidental optics, cannot fare better.

The communists could not bring about a revolution, but they were voted into and out of power. The power flowed not from the barrel of the gun but from the ballot box.

It is an inexplicable irony that India’s teeming millions have taken to democracy with such an amazing ease but her politicians still wallow in feudalistic possessiveness and swear by dynastic entitlement.

To get back to the enigma in question, is it attitudinal, as the adage our grandmas used to recite, ‘how does it matter whether it is Rama or Ravana who rules?’  or ‘how does it matter whether the dog goes to the left or right side of us as long as it does not bite’. ?

Whether it is the conditioning of a millennium of slavery or inherent qualities of patience, stoicism and urge for lawful behavior, the apodictic ground reality is that they have put up with the hardships with extra ordinary poise.

Let’s give wholeheartedly the ordinary nondescript Indian the encomiums he/she richly deserves.