My Salute to Indian Politicians

This is not a cynical or sarcastic backhanded appreciation of Indian politicians, but for a change a gracious acceptance of the role the Indian politician has played in shaping the past and present of this country.

In a society which has an absolutely vile image of politicians, it is kind of hard to see them through a different lens. But to understand their contribution you don’t have to strain hard – a casual run through of the stable governments in our neighbourhood would reveal the robustness and quality of Indian politicians over say Pakistan , Bangladesh or Nepal. In fact the only thing that stands between us and Pakistan style anarchy is our very own khadi clad pot-bellied politician.

No matter how corrupt or useless he may be he still is willing to sit out patiently in the opposition for the full term before he goes back to the people to present his bag of lies. He has been our favourite punching bag and we get to blame him for each and every ill that this country faces from economy to cricket, and some of them rightly being attributed to him. But also doing so has kept a billion strong electorate happy and united in their criticism.

At the end of the day, I would still prefer my pot-bellied khadi donning Indian politician over a Khaki clad general ruling the roost. I mean no offence to anyone in armed forces, but my point is armed forces weren’t designed or trained to run a country, rather they have a far more important role to play

I believe that every country deserves the government it gets. Politicians don’t come from a different planet, infact they are one of us, they have similar limitations and flaws as each one of us possess, so I don’t understand why we expect them to perform superhuman tasks when we don’t have such expectations from ourselves. It’s just that some of us step forward and get elected as leaders while others take up more comfy well paying white collar jobs and thus go on to become a part of the ever increasing skeptical electorate.There is nothing wrong in being skeptical and questioning your elected leaders’s motives ,but trying to demonize your elected representative is not the most constructive way of giving feedback.Indian politicians have been responsible for many blunders over the years from Kashmir to present day terrrorism, but considering the resources at hand including their own intellectual competency they took the most reasonable informed decision at that point of time, some of them paid off while others blew up in their faces, even Bush a Harvard graduate got Iraq & WMD completely wrong (our politicians aren’t far behind!!) This country won’t survive without a functioning parliament so no matter how insignificant their contribution is towards the growth of our country, politicians are vital for the running this democracy. As I said before without them we will be another Taliban overrun country. The problem with Techno-savvy urban folk like most us that we live under the impression that we know exactly what is best for the whole country, frankly we don’t, we only know what is good for yourselves. Therefore its best to listen to the electorate and their elected representatives – Mayawati, Laloo, Sonia, Rahul, Advani,Manmohan et al..they speak for the country while you speak for yourself.

 

Regardless of how substandard you feel they are it is from this pool of Indian politicians that we got leaders who played decisive leadership roles in our military victories over our neighbours (who were supposed to be governed by more accomplished military generals), we found economists who managed to pull this country out of economic gloom and got it to gallop as the second fastest growing economy, we found visionaries who understood the importance of being recognised as a Nuclear power in the coming future, we found agriculturists who ensured that we are a food-surplus nation now, we found hard-nosed practical administrators who managed to turn around the fortunes of the largest rail company in the world and so on.( Still not impressed !!)

Hence, I have no doubt that Indian politicians who will emerge victorious from the current elections would be the right people to lead this country into the future.

‘He is ugly and inefficient but he will get you there’