Dangers of short sightedness
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
Is our leadershp blind? Are they throwing away gains of unity and struggle for short term myopic goals? Do they not see dangers of short term appeasement?
We set stage by allowing people call for strikes and bandhs to call attention to their real and imaginary plights or for their perception of getting short changed. Blocking public access is increasingly becoming a way to call attention (may be because it works).
Road block in the city locality got escalated to blocking of National Highways on smallest of incident. Burning trains and damaging public property got escalated to stoppage of trains for days at length as seen in the recent gujjar (or gurjar if you prefer) agitation.
The license to block trains is now seen as legitimate way of expressing increasingly trivial hurt and presto we have sikhs in Mumbai doing the same followed by their bretheren in Punjab now.
By allowing such “free” expressions our leadership has, all along, and is encouraging a dangerous trend. Tomorrow even for smallest of local issue what prevents me and group of my rabble rousers (sorry aggrieved friends) to block trains in Delhi because the milkwallah of our locality fell sick and demanding immediate delivery of our milk? What is the difference? Or why not let people stop airplanes at airports by lying down on the runways?
Are we mortgaging our growth and national wealth to expression collective bargaining? At least leaders in the past showed some statemanship in announcing upcoming bandhs.
Again look at the outcome of gujjar agitation. Jats in Haryana now want appeasement and have announced start of their struggle to get it. How? Easy – Block trains and highways. Let nation go to dogs and economy get tattered. We shall win our reservation. Damned be the state of economy or inflation. Damned be national prosperity. It is “I” which is important.
Sad part is our leadership continues to allow this expression in name of democracy. Lawless is not democracy.
