Remember the time we sat in class with a monitor noting our every move? The chosen candidate was usually an academically brilliant sort or a teacher’s favourite. Both had limited understanding of the world but in school you are deemed limited pending education by those knowing better. When those knowing better let you act on their behalf, it is a high.
Within this paradigm, monitors came in two varieties. The one easier dealt with identified himself / herself as a victim; an avoidable responsibility — something they hadn’t asked for — being thrust on them. Notwithstanding their duty as monitors, this reluctant bunch saw themselves as part of the class. The second variety saw themselves as chosen and self-righteous, dispatched to keep an eye on a lesser category and empowered by higher powers to show them how to exist. Devoid of an individual mind and requiring to be told what is right and wrong, they sought out powerful others who could provide an agenda or a code of conduct.
Decades after leaving school, it is common for former classmates it is common for former classmates to meet and reminisce about school, the monitors they had, and even how reluctant or earnest the ones still in their midst were in such roles. When you look back, that old avatar seems unrecognisable. But what if no matter how old you grow you never leave school? You are still seeking out teachers and seniors to decide for you and then willingly submitting yourself to their agenda without an iota of introspection? Worse, what if the whole nation has become a pliant classroom and denies you the opportunity to notice what you are doing to yourself ? What if all that you hear is a chorus of approval for the juvenile immaturity you still cling to?
Arguably, India’s political right-wing is in a similar position. It should be clear as daylight to anyone of voting age that a democracy meant to work as an engagement between government and Opposition is in trouble if the latter is being systematically decimated, often using official machinery to embarrass and corner it. Besides being hammered by charges pressed against it, around the end of July, the toothless Opposition was being further defanged in Parliament with 27 members of Parliament suspended for staging protests. Whichever way I looked at it, all I could see was a familiar psychology on display — call it the ‘Monitor-Complex’. It is a belief in the right-wing that the people don’t know what they want and they — the political Right — will show the rest of the country (including the many who didn’t vote for them) how everything should be run. From suspending MPs to serving as vigilantes for culture and religion — the list is resplendent.
Needless to say, the key to such clarity and ease of conviction is blind faith in outsourced programming. As in the cinematic portrayal of such dystopian situations, there exists somewhere out there facilities where right-wing loyalists can plug a cable into their brains and download self-righteousness strong enough to hawk the delusion that a democracy with no Opposition is still a democracy. That such apolitical arrangement, supported by big business for the ease of decision-making and the market efficiency it promises, may be accepted as an equivalent of the people’s will. That the people are an ignorant bunch to be kept entertained by irrelevant contests, as at a Roman arena, while private agenda and questionable ones unfold,unnoticed.
In the real school, one eventually outgrew the system and its boring monitors. Even monitors outgrew their stay as teachers’ favourite, abandoned the supremacy of life by instruction, and accepted the right of others to decide and choose. ‘Really? That was me?’ — some may ask incredulously, gazing at old photographs from school and reminiscing the roles they played then. But when a nation declines to outgrow school and its monitors, it is a problem— a really big problem — for there is no escape from this to that. It amounts to the same immaturity, the same brainwashed gaze. It is the progressive death of choice and the rise of the democracy of one.