Every politician, when he leaves office, ought to go straight to jail and serve his time, thus goes an American folk saying. Politics and politicians have come to be synonymous with dishonesty, favouritism, and corruption. This perhaps is the underlying reasoning for many good and competent people to stay away from active politics; and many corrupt and incompetent people to get attracted to active politics. The good people’s silence and inaction make it easy for the wicked people to fill the world with their opinions, lies, and propaganda; and establish their agendas and actions as normal and standard. For Gandhi, being political was not a choice, but an imperative. He famously said, “Anyone who says they are not interested in politics is like a drowning man who insists he is not interested in water.” Gandhi returned to India on 19 December 1914, after his sojourn in England and South Africa, as quite a matured man of forty-five, having seen the worlds of exploiters and the exploited.
Parties and governments are competing over who will push for a more policed and disciplined society. It gives a false sense of safety. On 14 August, as India was celebrating the Nehruvian stroke of the midnight hour, when the world was sleeping, and India awoke to life and freedom; elsewhere and everywhere in our country men and women, especially women in large numbers hit the streets on the eve of Independence Day, to protest the rape and murder of a trainee doctor on duty in RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata; and the attempt of the powerful to derail the course of the investigation; they hit the road to reclaim their life and freedom. The ruling dispensation and patriarchal establishments narcissistically keep feeling good about everything in our country and broadcast it across the globe generously, but the protest indicated that women of the country do not feel the same, they feel the former and the strong men of our country are just feeling good but
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