Sunday, May 3, 2009

Cynical of Democracy - Whom to blame ?

Recent reports and discussions on our Main Stream Media post phase 3 of polling has been at most hilarious and Hypocritical, the appalling 44% odd polling in Mumbai has sent the Media on a fact finding mission or to be more precise, another fault finding mission ??

After 26/11 and all the Media "activism" with Jaago re , Aamir khan and all the Glamor, what we all get is a couple of percentage drop in polling over last elections :) . The fault finding mission has implicated and convicted everything that could have been possibly done The list starts from the political class , talks about the summers blames politicians again for the schedule and ends again with the political class. Every one is to blame but for the Media, and they can be really quick to in fact take credit for the 44% who exercised their right (duty ?).

I feel this is the first major success our media has had in their attempt at destroying our institutions. I feel the Media should take full blame for creating unfounded cynicism in the political class and the system, instead of trying to get people take interest in the political process the media has actually forced people to only take interest in ridiculing politics and politicians .

In the entire political process in the current general elections the media was successful in making the elections issue less when every politician in the opposition was trying to raise genuine issues of national interest the Media could only find Varun Gandhi as a worthwhile issue to hog prime time space, they could only pick up the "My daddy Strongest" rhetoric of all poll issues, they could only find the nose of a certain Priyanka Gandhi of prime time interest (is she even a primary member of a political party ? ) , of 48 pages of a manifesto , an IT vision , an Infrastructure Vision, all the media could find is a paragraph on Cultural Humanism worthwhile of debate, of Hour long political speeches what only enthused the media was a drunken man flinging projectiles aimlessly.

Where were the issues which actually people could relate to, where was the debate on which political formation had a better vision / plan to get India out of the terrible economic crisis we are going through , where was the debate on food price inflation, where was the debate on unemployment, Infrastructure, development, Internal security, external threats. Why wasn't the sadak, bijli Pani given the importance it deserved ?

When Varun Gandhi spoke of nationalism and forgetting about caste identities (after release on parole) where was the same media which hounded him for a fortnight when he allegedly made communal remarks ??

Kudos to the Media for its success in demonising Politics and politicians as a class and giving democracy a body blow.