West Word: The Blurriness Of Party Lines 

By Sadhana Seelam

In America, where I've lived for about half my life, the delineation between the two major parties, Democrat and Republican has always been fairly clear, lately, it's become starkly clear. President Trump has made it his cause celebre to take a rich highlighter to draw flagrant lines that demarcate one from the other and hence in America at least, divisionism is well and thriving.

In fact, this trend seemed manifest during Brexit and as the contagion spread, people felt the need to take sides between the two or three political avenues available to them in other parts of Western Europe.

In some countries however, there is no such ideological divide that keeps the divider between the parties intact. In India, all is maneuverable. Candidates are elected to a party, the largest democracy in the world votes, its citizens lose hours of productivity during the electioneering and pamphleteering process and no sooner are the results announced, horse trading begins. It's a fairly fail safe, get-rich-quick ploy that probably started during the Congress hey days at the national level. Today, everyone in the business of politics has perfected it to what amounts to political fine art in current times.

TDP has made horse trading and dangling of carrots in the face of politicians' faces while holding a torch to their feet a patented play. TDP's resilience in barreling through to power despite all the evidence against them in 'cash for vote' schemes, etc only shows how well entrenched politics and journalism are.

One cannot fail to recall how Naidu's now friend, Modi and his party needed Naidu and how badly Naidu needed Modi in the last state-wide AP election. Of course, in the I scratch your back, you scratch mine set up, the fact that Naidu dismissed Modi as a national 'pariah' didn't seem to bother Modi or hurt Naidu. Perhaps it's the salve that the gains of political successes shower on such folks and their ‘advisors’ think Amit Shah, who shares a Lady Gaga like status within the BJP. It probably does not hurt to have affluence of that level lubricate your path and your hurt ego, enabling one to swallow all types of affronts in the pursuit of unimaginable monetary rewards.

The lines that are tying a cordon around the Left and Right movements in the US are clearly quite blurred in India. The most recent drama where party lines were so smudged, you cannot see what primary colors were in the painting to begin with, was in Bihar! With Nitish Kumar falling prey to the machinations of some master chess players in the BJP and ditching Lalu Prasad Yadav, with the sudden realization that came to him through some divine apparition that the Yadavs were corrupt!

Of course, there is no telling just to what extent ruling parties have used the judicial system in India to work as their own cudgel, their swift wielding baton which they've used at will and unquestioned by the media to jail leaders with pristine records, to fabricate freely. This blatant, looking the other way, by the media has in effect distorted the country's trajectory and development and has wrought irreparable harm on its helpless masses.

India wears the label of world’s largest democracy with poetic pride and struts around the world's stage buffeted by the winds of a press swayed to the happy tune of party in power favors. At the end of the day, Indian newspapers and media have shrugged off their journalistic oaths in favor of their patrons, the ruling parties in power.

It does not behoove one news media to cite and shame another by calling out specific news items, but for discerning readers and media watchers, there are as many examples available as there are politicians and journalists, as to the warped nature of media reporting.

So, at the end of the day, for those party lines to remain clear, the onus it seems, falls on you and me. Yes, ordinary folks like us, who diligently carve out our monthly incomes to pay our bills and save for retirement. We, who’ve been able to account for the few dimes we've had to spend, are the ones best equipped to keep watch on the miserable motivations driving our khadi clad men and the pens writing their stories.

All this blurriness in our politics will hopefully spur us into full awareness of our lack luster media sold out to feckless politicians. Maybe now, ordinary citizens will demand clarity that can only be pushed out to face public scrutiny using the sheer force of their convictions and hold politicians to standards that were idealized and believed in when we first started on the path towards press freedom.

Those standards don't need to be romantic, unreachable stars, those standards should be holding ourselves to our vulnerabilities. That feat, far from being impossible, is achievable and more importantly, it can be liberating. Also, we need to hold ourselves upright and unencumbered by the unseemly haste to get wealthy and reach the apex of power centers, and remind people who run for office on the premise of wanting to serve the poor to do that, to serve the poor and the not yet so poor, folks like us, to awaken people to the poetry of want and the rewards of struggle and showcase the underlying and far reaching merits of fairplay.

Not only do we have the need to keep our party lines from getting sullied, so India stays the democratic course without hypocrisy but we need to somehow become the custodians of our democracy. We can begin by calling out the newsmedia who are dodging and hiding behind the dhotis of the powers that be that while they may be for sale, our credulity and credibility aren’t.