Let me do what television news channels do everywhere—use a small survey sample to make a large political, cultural or social point. It may not make for accuracy but it sure does make for good television.
To coincide with the three-day parliamentary debate over what, if any, kind of Lokpal or ombudsman should be created to counter raging public corruption in India, NDTV, reputedly a leading television news channel, is asking its viewers to rate lawmakers as they make their own argument for or against.
I have reproduced here two visuals from NDTV’s website that are striking for what they reveal in terms of political trends. It is amazing to see how political interests of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) align so closely with a vociferous urban middle-class movement led by Anna Hazare that is demanding a virtually parallel law enforcement, arrest and prosecution system.
If you study the voting pattern you would notice a couple of striking results. Every political grouping except the BJP and the Hazare group has been rated less than five on a scale of ten with India’s once much heralded Prime Minister of unimpeachable personal integrity, Manmohan Singh, at 4. In sharp contrast, both the BJP members who spoke during the debate, Sushma Swaraj and Yashwant Singh scored a solid 8. Now both scoring 8 may be taken as a coincidence but if you look at Hazare and his two closest supporters, Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi, they too have scored a solid 8. If that is a coincidence, it is a bloody good one.
If there is more incontrovertible evidence of how the Hazare-led movement is not just political but political with a distinct hue, I cannot find. This is me talking the way television channels make snap political judgments merely because they reflect a trend based on a few thousand votes in a country whose total number of registered voters is 675 million.
I fear that it is this ability to hijack and control the public discourse merely because a section of Indian society is urban, tech savvy and with 24/7 access to the broadcast instruments that inordinately influence the legislative process and public policy making, a few thousand clickers in a few major cities might be able to overwhelm 675 million others. One can argue that but that’s how democracy works. Well, then that’s how it should not work.
