By S Satyanarayanan
No doubt the slapping of the Indian Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar by an angry man amply reflect the distress of common man in India, who is burdened by inflation. However, such a ‘maverick’ reaction has no place in democracy or civilised society.
This kind of atrocious behaviour will only result in the political class ganging up and creating an even thicker wall around them to ‘safeguard’ themselves from such public ire in the future. This kind of behaviour also trivialise the civil society’s efforts in the past few months to mount pressure on the ruling government on the twin bigger evils “corruption” and “price rise”.
Already the Union Home Ministry has taken a serious view of the incident and has decided to review the security of the Ministers and other important political functionaries. This would mean additional spending on security to prevent such incident in the future, the cost of which again will be derived from taxpayers account.
The Thursday’s unsavoury incident is a lesson for both the ruling and the ruled classes alike. While the ruling class cannot afford to take the common man for granted at least on key issues like price rise, corruption, etc, the common man should realise that such atrocious behaviour is not the solution to their problems and stand up and use their ‘right of franchise’ judiciously to elect representatives, who can deliver.
Writer is an Associate Editor of Afro Asian Business Chronicle
