India’s political overview

I’m not someone who thinks education is everything, but come on, surely being educated is better than not being educated at all, right? I live in a tier 1 city in India, and let me tell you what we’re dealing with here. My Member of Parliament is at least a graduate from a politically connected family, fine, but my MLA? He’s 8th pass. Eighth pass! And of course, he’s also from a politically influential family, and his sons and various local body members are floating around too, none of them more than graduates if we’re being generous. Look, I’m not trying to disrespect graduation as a qualification, it’s perfectly respectable, but an 8th pass MLA? Seriously? What kind of governance can we expect from someone like that? People voted for him purely because he was born into the right family, that’s it. That’s the only credential that mattered.

I keep thinking about what Osho said, you know that quote, “Democracy is of the people, by the people, for the people, but the people are retarded.” God, it feels uncomfortably accurate sometimes. This is what our democracy has become. You’re literally voting for local goons and then somehow expecting them to run things properly in this country. It’s absurd when you actually think about it.

And it’s not just at the local level either. Even the Prime Minister, several sitting Union Ministers, so many people in positions of power, their educational qualifications are questionable at best. These are the people running our entire country. Based on what understanding? What expertise? What knowledge? We require a peon to have at least passed 12th standard to do basic administrative work, and I’m not saying that to demean anyone’s profession because all work has dignity, but that’s the standard for the bare minimum. Yet somehow this standard doesn’t apply to the people who represent us, who make policies that affect millions of lives, who are supposed to work for the people? The whole system is corrupt to its core.

Sometimes I genuinely feel we need to break free from this version of democracy we’re practicing. Think about it. How does it make sense that someone who has absolutely no idea what they’re voting for has the same voting power as someone who’s informed and engaged? Someone who was literally paid to vote, someone who doesn’t know or care what’s happening around them, and someone who’s actually aware and updated, they all get the same single vote. Where’s the logic in that?

There needs to be accountability, at the very least. Politicians who don’t fulfill their promises should face real consequences, maybe even imprisonment. There should be an independent agency whose job is to educate people about what actually went wrong in the previous term, what promises were made versus what was delivered. Or maybe we need a stronger bureaucratic system to balance things out, though honestly, even bureaucracy is riddled with corruption, so I don’t know if that’s the answer either. I don’t have all the solutions, I really don’t, but what I do know with absolute certainty is that this system we’re operating under right now is broken and corrupt and fundamentally wrong. Something has to change. We can’t keep going like this.