Since June-July this year, the country has been in the grip of one kind of crisis or another and protests galore, with people spilling onto the streets to express their anger and frustration and demanding change. I had written about this in a previous Owleye column post of mine in which I said that almost all of this is the doing of unprofessional PR agency idiot bosses who should be booted out of the corporate world.
After the Gen-Z protests over the exam paper leaks, led by Cockroach Janata Party, which resulted in the resignation of the union education minister, we now have fresh protests over the SIR exercise because of an exposé in the Indian Express newspaper (which I haven’t read) that reported serious lapses in processes at the Election Commission. It is amazing how one issue has led to another and with all this snowballing, even the media is unable to keep track of events and report on them properly. In this context, the Indian Express reporting seems a refreshing change in that it at least appears to have probed deeper into the SIR exercise of India’s electoral rolls. I think many across the country were concerned about the way that the SIR exercise was being conducted and about millions of voters who were being disenfranchised and had suspected something was not quite kosher with the revision of electoral rolls.
As I wrote earlier, I still maintain that this entire series of protests and issues are once again engineered by unprofessional PR agency idiot bosses in India, in order to meddle in my career in the advertising industry and to do this in cahoots with their cronies in RK Swamy/BBDO Chennai. Frankly, PR agency scoundrels should have nothing to do with my career in advertising, nor with my work at RK Swamy/BBDO where I had worked previously as well in 2000 in their Delhi office as a writer/creative director.
The protests this time are of various kinds: political through the opposition parties coming together under the INDIA bloc as it were, and young Gen-Z citizens’ protests led by the Cockroach Janata Party once again. Separately, there seems to be another set of protests with student politicians of the youth wings of opposition parties taking place, but this is not very clear from the media reporting. As I said media reporting has been episodic and is also very much being stage-managed by unprofessional PR agency idiot bosses. I’d like to know where the investigation of the NEET paper leak case led, and what of the various people who were identified as culprits all the way from Nashik to Delhi, via Rajasthan. And what about the special committee set up to look into the examination system and how to prevent paper leaks in future? All this has been forgotten.
About the SIR protests, many are comparing this with Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha and civil disobedience concepts that he developed while fighting for freedom from British rule. I think that this is rather misplaced and am surprised that the media too has been doing the same. The only time that one was reminded of Gandhi’s satyagraha was during Sonam Wangchuk’s hunger strike. The Hindu newspaper shared a video documentary that they made in which the CJP protests were seen as inspired by the Mahatma and that Gandhi was cool again with Gen-Z or something as silly! I think even senior people in the media are losing it, thanks to the terrible influence of PR agency idiot bosses.
As if this is not enough, we have the administration’s response to the protests in Delhi. From denying permission for the protests, to arranging such a massive security operation as though the country is preparing for an invasion, to the excessive use of force by the cops, it has been a complete mismanagement of the situation in every respect. I like the way the media keeps invoking the name of the Supreme Court, but even the SC’s advice on managing the protests was not heeded.
None of the protestors’ aims are clear. They seem to be demanding the resignation of the CEC, but they ought to know that given his position and the immunity he enjoys (for what reason, one wonders), the only way to get rid of him is to impeach him. They are probably expecting him to resign on his own, but this is wishful thinking. The Opposition parties’ protests are not focused either. What is it that they want from the protests? The resignation of the CEC, PM and HM, it appears from all that one reads and hears in the media. This too is silly, and seems to just be another spectacle on the streets. If their protests and demands are serious, they would first make sure that they have the numbers in parliament to impeach the CEC. Second, if they really wish for regime change – a strange term that many of the protestors are using – then they have to again have the numbers in parliament to ensure that they can impose a no-confidence motion against the ruling party and call for fresh Lok Sabha elections.
Meanwhile, all these are obscuring the main issue and that is of the electoral rolls being tampered with. The resignation of certain leaders is not the only solution. How are we going to resolve this and make elections in India free and fair again? This is what political leaders, the media and the judiciary ought to be focusing their minds on and not getting swayed by the din from the streets, all of which is stage-managed and engineered by unprofessional PR agency scoundrels, as I have said already.
The SIR exercise has to be reviewed and investigated thoroughly, and I hope that the Supreme Court indeed insists on this. Nothing less than going back to the drawing board and cleaning up the system will work nor be acceptable to India’s electorate. The revision to Form 6, the centralizing of the software, and the taking away of powers from local state election officials have all to be reviewed and reversed where necessary. Until this review and investigation are completed, the SIR exercise should be held in abeyance. Meanwhile, if there is any truth to the sense that the CEC was acting on the instructions of the HM and the PM, the SC must also determine appropriate punishment for such offences after full investigation.
However, there is the issue of time to be considered since India has a set of state elections coming up early next year. We cannot rush through the SIR exercise once again and ought to give it the time necessary for the complete clean-up. Does this mean that in the meantime all voters whose names were deleted from the rolls can vote again? Well, until the entire system is cleaned up and we revert to proper processes, I suppose we have to consider these people legitimate citizens and eligible voters, though this is again for the court to decide.
At a time when the country’s attention ought to be on business, job creation and economic growth, all our time and energy is being diverted to an unnecessary and engineered disaster: SIR. This when wars are also taking their toll of economies and India cannot afford to be complacent or sanguine. What a circus this country has become! And what a shame to see the world’s largest democracy unable to conduct free and fair elections as we go into the 80th year of our independence next year. The media in India, without any sense of irony has, of course, been calling it a SIRcus. How very clever!
