With Goa’s Assembly elections drawing closer, the parivartanists and the commotionists are back at play, presenting old wine as new and promising ‘Aache din’ for the distressed and desperate ‘Aam Admi’. With the ‘Vote for Change’ slogan that was employed during the last Assembly elections of 2012 now becoming disastrously unpopular among the masses after all the U-turns and somersaults, we seem to be getting a remixed version of the same slogan being marketed to us as ‘Vote for New Faces’. In the run-up to any election the emphasis shifts to paralysing human reasoning and inflaming passions. Even the appearance of priests, swamis, or imams on supposedly apolitical platforms cannot be taken as a guarantee for the secular and genuine intentions of any organisation.
Goa’s present politics is as cunning and baffling as the disease of alcoholism and drug addiction. Getting familiar with transactional analysis of human behaviour to understand the ‘Games People’s Play‘ and ‘Games Alcoholics Play’ would also possibly help to understand the ‘Games Politicians Play’. While the Politician-Corporate nexus is obsessed with promoting ‘smart cities’, it is time that those concerned about preserving the secular, socialist and democratic fabric of our country’s Constitution need to focus on creating political constituencies of Smart Voters. The voter therefore needs to learn to stop being driven by manufactured micro-issues such as airports, special status, regional plan, marinas, mega-housing, corruption, casinos,…which divert attention from the actual epicentre that sustains the filthy, shameless and deceptive political governance. It is the voters, instead of crafty politicians, who should drive the political debate to macro-level and long-term Human Development issues alongside accountable and transparent systems of governance.
We are in an era of Crowd Capital, Crowd Funding and such other platforms that drive our minds and manipulate our actions. This ‘crowd’ that we talk about in technology is hardly different from a ‘mob’ or ‘herd’ mindset. The individual’s independent space for independent thinking does not exist for a market driven economy which fuels public opinion based on a cyber-cloud reality instead of ground realities. Human behaviour studies show us that it is difficult to reason with a mob. Generating mob frenzy or herd mentality is now a multi-crore industry being employed by politicians to manufacture public consent.
Pulling free from a crowd mentality and being an informed and independently thinking individual is the challenge that lies before every Goan today. Learning to pull one’s own strings and not allowing politicians and their agents to pull one’s strings during elections can be the only antidote to the deceptive, disastrous and treacherous governance this State has been witnessing. Continuing to be a victim of mob hysteria and so-claimed popular opinion during elections can only be a sure recipe to ensure the continuance of Goa’s filthy and criminal politics. Democracy does not fail its citizens. It is the citizens who through their reckless and selfish choices that fail democracy. New faces with an old political mind-set will hardly help eradicate the exploitation and loot which is experienced by the masses in Goa.
