Gujarat elections: Whose voice matters? The Voters or the Media?
Sulekha.com
December 27, 2007
http://jayji.sulekha.com/blog/post/2007/12/gujarat-elections-whose-voice-matters-the-voters.htm

Several days have elapsed since the election results were announced in Gujarat. The people have spoken, they have voted for what they see as progress, development, prosperity, security. In short, they have voted for a FUTURE.

And yet, the whinnying of the secular "chamchas" and their Kangressi masters remains unabated. Sibal, once again, calls Modi a "fascist" (he, like his cohorts is obviously linguistically challenged!) and among the scores of other media nonentities, Burka Dutt and Sheela Bhatt, the twin princesses of sickular spin, use up hours of air time and acres of web space to presume that the Gujarati "log" are ignoramuses, that they know not what is good for them and their kids, that somehow, by voting for Modi, the received wisdom of sickularism is compromised.

There is no hope for such closed minds. They remind us of the Group Think experiment that psychologists carried out with some monkeys. It goes something like this:

The scientists placed five monkeys in an enclosure in the middle of which was placed a ladder with bananas at the top. Every time a monkey went up the ladder, the scientists soaked the rest of the monkeys with a cold water shower.

After a while, every time a monkey went up the ladder, the others beat up the one that attempted to climb the ladder and it was observed that no monkey dared to go up the ladder regardless of the temptation.The scientists then decided to substitute one of the monkeys. The first thing this new monkey did was to go up the ladder. As soon as he attempted this, the other monkeys beat him up. After several beatings, the new member learned not to climb the ladder even though he never knew why.

Over the course of time, each of the remaining four monkeys was replaced with a new one until none of the five monkeys had experienced the cold shower treatment. However at each replacement of a monkey who actually had experienced the cold shower, the new monkey was beaten up as soon as he tried to get the bananas on the ladder.

With five monkeys, none of who had experienced the cold shower, the scientists found that not one was brave enough to go for the bananas.

The sickularists are like these monkeys; over generations they have been told that their ideology (minortyism and dividing society is secular and good, anything Hindu is communal and bad). They all suffer from the cold shower psychosis served up and fine tuned by their masters. All they know is one song: Our brand of secularism is good, anything else is bad.

When asked why, all they can say is “How dare you! If you don’t think like us, you are a fascist. Shut up, and don’t ask inconvenient questions!”

This is their excuse since what they really mean to say is: “I don’t know – that’s how things are supposed to be around here, and I am not prepared to use my brains to question why I believe this”

Now, back to Gujarat, the Voters, and Modi….

Like him or loathe him, Modi has achieved much more in his period in office than the Kangressis have achieved through their dynasty in eighty years!

Unlike either the Nehru/"Gandhi" clan with their "high society" roots or the Mulayams of this world who have worn their caste as a status symbol for imagined discrimination from the powerless Brahmins, both of whom have retained power and delivered zilch, Modi, the son of a Ganchi family - OBCs - has used intelligence, leadership, an understanding of the power of the human spirit and sheer personal energy and determination to achieve for Gujarat what he has. That his administration employs the same public sector officials and staff and yet has revolutionised the way education, electricity, water, planning permissions, and justice etc are delivered is a lesson in leadership and direction to all States as well as the centre governing the Indian Union.

The trouble with the Ivory Tower "secularists" many of them in the media, NGOs, "pressure groups" and the so called "arts", is that they have never had to work for their Roti; they live cosseted lives and only talk the talk; they do not have the guts to walk the walk. In effect, they preach an ideology without substance. It does not even qualify as Hot Air, never mind constitute the ethereal quality of vapour.

Modi, in contrast, has put his moral/ethical compass and the ideologies he cultivated from his RSS roots to achieve what he has done. Like them or loath them, these are Modi’s bearings and they have borne fruit where the pandering to Socialism of various flavours as practiced at the centre by the Kangressis or the Commies of W Bengal or the casteist parties, Kangressis included, in TN, Bihar, and elsewhere have failed!

Those same "secularists" who point to the Gujarat Riots are disingenuous in their criticisms, since an even longer, larger finger can be pointed to the Sikh Massacres of 1984 to say nothing of the riots that have plagued various parts of the country post independence as well as pre-independence. BTW, when is a massacre an act of Genocide? Clearly in the eyes of most of the myopic media and in the mind of PM Manmohan, 3000 Sikhs dying at the hands of his party men hoodlums is of less consequence than the riots of Gujarat. By his non-action on this matter, Manmohan has sullied the title that the Gurus conferred on the Sikhs and does not deserve to be called Singh.

Before criticising Modi, besides looking at their own spectacular record of consistent non-achievement, these spineless leftists and secularists should also flash a little glance at their comrades in the communist heaven to the north or the land of the pure, especially carved out for India’s favoured “minority” to the west of India’s borders and see the effects of monolithic control by exclusivist ideologies.

To India’s west, they will find guns, bombs, breakdown of law and order, military (mis)rule, the complete non-existence of basic human rights not just for minorities but for women. Turning to the north, even the blind will see the systematic destruction of the ancient culture of Tibet, rampant pollution affecting hundreds of millions in urban areas, the forced displacement of the rural millions by the state in its quest for economic domination through dumping even more lead and other pollutant infested bric-a-brac on the worlds markets, and, in exchange for oil and other commodities, complicity with fundamentalist regimes who are perpetrating REAL genocide in places like Darfur. One supposes that the thinking in the corridors of power in Beijing is that what works at home cannot be challenged when others apply it to their own unwanted minorities, does it?

But then, when one has no leg to stand on, it is easy to chuck stones at someone who is achieving something. The people of Gujarat have spoken through the ballot box and it is time for the pundits to go back under the rocks that they inhabit.