Them and us

Them and us

One set of laws for us, another for them politicians. This cannot pass in free India.

Two incidents caught on camera in recent days involving the kin of influential politicians assaulting public servants and preventing them from discharging their duties reveal the ugly face of politics that must have no place in “New India”. Indore MLA Akash Vijayvargiya, son of influential BJP leader Kailash Vijayvargiya, is now out on bail after assaulting an Indore municipal corporation official with a cricket bat. The officer was trying to evict a family residing in a building certified as unsafe and slated for demolition – when Akash interfered in violent fashion.

On Sunday a ruling Telangana legislator’s brother Koneru Krishna Rao, himself a politician, brutally attacked a woman forest range officer on an afforestation drive. She was leading a team planting saplings on reserve forest land when the mob led by Koneru rained blows claiming that the land belonged to them. Such mob attacks with political sanction have a demoralising effect on officers. They can even paralyse governance if the accused walk away scot free.

The politicians involved claim they were helping out hapless citizens. Even if this is the case, nothing allows politicians to take the law into their hands. They are actually best placed to intercede for aggrieved citizens with the arms of the state, given their proximity to power. Instead the outlines of a new apartheid, or a new caste system, are very much in evidence where politicians see themselves as a class apart from the rest of society. If more evidence of the new apartheid is needed, look no further than the abuses that politicians routinely heap on each other during election time with absolute forbearance. But when ordinary citizens choose to describe the same politicians in similar or milder vein the full force of the state and attendant anachronistic laws such as sedition and criminal defamation are used to silence them.

Over time public patience has worn thin for politicians who flaunt their VIP status and dynasties. It is governance that takes a hit when the bureaucracy has to function amid threats to life and limb. Politicians often hinder public servants whose duties involve preventing encroachments, illegal mining, electricity theft and sundry other civil violations. The likes of Akash and Koneru, with their violent actions and sense of entitlement, are a poor advertisement for democracy. They should be sacked by their respective parties.