Chaotic Democracy-unbridled
freedom
A recent spat between a final year student of
St. Stephen’s college, New Delhi and the
principal who happens to be a priest has left me dismayed and question
democracy and individual right and liberties. It also begs the question does
democracy slow down progress? And are we becoming more and more intolerantly
conscious to the extent that we fail to draw the line between individual
freedom and freedom of society or are we usurping laid down traditions and
principles in the guise of individual freedom, expression and modernity?
This St. Stephen’ s spat is not
something that has suddenly erupted, readers will do well to go back in time
and recollect the issue of minority run private institutions being denied govt.
funding, or the debate about Govt. funds not be disbursed to institutions that
were minority run with minority quota and the lot. If a minority run
institution be funded by the Govt. it had to do away with the quota reservation
for minorities. Alumni and others had public spat in newspaper columns and
other places about the ills of taking minority students when deserving non-minority
students were been shunned. This debate thankfully subsided and life went on
till this lady professor saw something unholy in the system and with the teacher’s
organisation volunteers tried to brow beat the management into toeing their
line of thought. This debate too went on for a short period before dying a
natural death. The moot point being that St. Stephens College was in the news
for the wrong reasons and the reasons seemed deliberately aimed at tarnishing
its reputation.
Past students will vouch for the
quality of education and to this day minority and non-minority students make a
beeline for this institution as if mere presence in its corridors would help
rub off on an individual helping him/her to progress beyond the ordinary. However
there is a concentrated effort going on to push the reputation beyond repair
and force it to lose its sheen by people with vested interest. In our days a
teacher would strap us and cane us unendingly without a murmur, but in modern
times we dare not subject our kids to this form of punishment. The modern world
terms it barbarity and inhuman and beyond acceptable norms of behaviour.
Parents go to court and activists display placard and banners finding work in
these upheavals.
So did we turn out to be
scoundrels, were our parents not pained by the punishment meted out in schools?
But they sided with the school management always without as much as a murmur.
The general belief doing the rounds was that it was part of the learning
process and it would make a man out of a boy. Today teachers and principals are
ghearoed and beaten up, arrested and face trials which continue life long, so
much so that indiscipline is routinely tolerated in schools for fear of
backlash from parents and wards. This has lead our society to be inpatient and
intolerant to the process of life and the tumultuous happenings around us.
Government’s barge into the
mainstay of managements and even IIM’s ae not spared, everyone wants to control
everything around them without so much think about the damage it causes to
society through our children and students. Learned members and luminaries take
sides in this battle each trying to outdo the other and prove a point. What
reverberates in the cold is the suffocation of the vast majority who do not
want to have anything to do with this system but who are victims to the whims
and fancies of the minority who are vocally dominant.
True we live in a democracy and
everyone is free to practice his beliefs, for the same reason a motorist should
be allowed to drive on the payments and a pedestrian allowed to walk in the
middle of the road, what comes out of this situation is chaos for the
prevention of which, certain laws are formed and it becomes incumbent on road
users to follow them. Going by the same philosophy we are free to propagate our
views the way we want, but what must ultimately prevail is a balanced and tolerant
viewpoint, a view point that takes into consideration not only democracy with unbridled
rights but democracy that allows questioning without turning it into chaos.
Forcing the institution to bow to
an individual’s viewpoint may be trespassing on the rights of the silent
majority as equally trampling laid down process that is time tested and that
has evolved out of a churning process over the years. Call the principal names
if you must, disrespect him if you must but don’t call your teacher one for
that would be exposing one’s character and lessons learnt to the outside world
thereby laying bare your true self. Parents though prone to side with their
kids must always advise them to the contrary, for as goes the saying ‘courtesy
does not cost it pays’ and we must not practice our views at the cost of a
majoritarian viewpoint.
Robin Varghese
19th April 2015.
