It was said that in Jacobean times (as the Age of Shakespeare came to a close) the courtiers were 'spaniels to the King, and wolves to the people.' Four centuries later, has anything changed?
The same self-serving scum are still fawning around the dining tables of our rulers, licking their feet for crumbs and easy pickings, and attempting to sway public opinion with their yips and yaps, their barks and bawls.
History has shown that they do not matter. This mongrel pack flourished at the time of the infamous Emergency. Official, and worse, voluntary censorship was in force. Babus and bureaucrats, journalists and businessmen, film stars and media moguls crawled when they were given the signal to bend. The King and his court could do no wrong, then, as now.
The scum did not count, because the people remained unswayed by their glib rhetoric. The masses voted as one to turn the tide, and save democracy from drowning in the ocean of sycophancy. This was despite the arithmetic, the statistics , the economics and the logic freely proffered in print and in public, by the spaniels-turned-wolves of the ruling dispensation.
Many seem to have forgotten those days. They are busy singing hosannas to the ruler of the moment. Having given the others sixty years, they say, this one deserves five more. No one is given fifty or sixty years. All get five at a time. Beware the ruler who says at the end of a term that five years is not enough. That is a sure sign that he is not to be trusted, that the next five years, and the next, and the five years after that, will not be enough; but as we have found that we can trust our people, we can rest assured that the people will pull him down.
In one way at least, Kerala is the right model. Neither Tweedledum nor Tweedledee gets a day more than five years. The people watch the hungry hound suck the bone of government dry in two and a half years, and listen to the promises bayed out every day after that for the next thirty months. Five years of nirahara in the emaciated ranks of the Opposition follows. The new rulers follow the pattern, and the wheel turns on them too. Every five years the voter gets to wield the stick to drive the thieving pack away.
It seems the world, and not just our corner of it, is ripe for the Kerala model of 'Drive Them Out.'
The same self-serving scum are still fawning around the dining tables of our rulers, licking their feet for crumbs and easy pickings, and attempting to sway public opinion with their yips and yaps, their barks and bawls.
History has shown that they do not matter. This mongrel pack flourished at the time of the infamous Emergency. Official, and worse, voluntary censorship was in force. Babus and bureaucrats, journalists and businessmen, film stars and media moguls crawled when they were given the signal to bend. The King and his court could do no wrong, then, as now.
The scum did not count, because the people remained unswayed by their glib rhetoric. The masses voted as one to turn the tide, and save democracy from drowning in the ocean of sycophancy. This was despite the arithmetic, the statistics , the economics and the logic freely proffered in print and in public, by the spaniels-turned-wolves of the ruling dispensation.
Many seem to have forgotten those days. They are busy singing hosannas to the ruler of the moment. Having given the others sixty years, they say, this one deserves five more. No one is given fifty or sixty years. All get five at a time. Beware the ruler who says at the end of a term that five years is not enough. That is a sure sign that he is not to be trusted, that the next five years, and the next, and the five years after that, will not be enough; but as we have found that we can trust our people, we can rest assured that the people will pull him down.
In one way at least, Kerala is the right model. Neither Tweedledum nor Tweedledee gets a day more than five years. The people watch the hungry hound suck the bone of government dry in two and a half years, and listen to the promises bayed out every day after that for the next thirty months. Five years of nirahara in the emaciated ranks of the Opposition follows. The new rulers follow the pattern, and the wheel turns on them too. Every five years the voter gets to wield the stick to drive the thieving pack away.
It seems the world, and not just our corner of it, is ripe for the Kerala model of 'Drive Them Out.'
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