Tyson move over. Govt’s here with killing punch

If there was anything that hit people harder than Delhi Daredevils’ skipper Virender Sehwag’s muddled decisions at Chennai on Friday night, it was the petrol bomb that the Government exploded all over the public without premise.

Both the actions were felling, though the latter will haunt and hurt like a festering wound for a much longer time. While Sehwag can still be forgiven for having lost it in the mind or for being cavalier, the Government’s extreme insensitivity and the deliberate intention to injure is beyond redemption and should now become its undoing.

A slew of jokes that popped up on the social networking sites just after the whopping Rs 7-plus increase in per litre of petrol were zany and tickled. One said, agle janam mujhe petrol pump hi dijo, taking off from the title of one popular TV serial. The other showed Batman giving up his lean mean petrol driven vehicle to use Spiderman as his transporter. Yet another one showed a boy proposing to a girl with a petrol can instead of a diamond ring and the girl saying ‘yes’ ecstatically.

Then there were hundreds of tweets, some by celebrities who too felt the pinch of the huge jump in petrol prices despite their deep pockets and far away existence from the common population. The most arresting one was from actor Akshay Kumar who wondered why the BMWs, the Audis and Chryslers were in the huge line to fill petrol on the midnight of the price rise? Really, why would people who own a vehicle which costs a crore or more want to save up on a few drops of petrol? Obviously, it was the huge jump in prices that startled even them.

Yes, all this was funny but how long can this Government dote on its citizenry’s ability to laugh at itself is a question many are asking. The public has shown its extreme ability to take every punch in its stride but now it is time that some campaign is put together to send this Government to a correctional facility.

If a Prime Minister, who once upon a time happened to be a keen economic reformist, announces from his cushioned environs that all is well with the nation and the economy is, in fact, booming as never before, one needs to give him a reality check. And the quotient for the measure of prosperity should not be the facts and figures he may throw at you righteously, but the real plight of the common man which stands ignored blatantly. What will you do with a booming economy that throws a bulk of its population off the ledge of even a budgeted existence and stretches its pockets to a point of no return?

It is strange that despite years of blunders, scams and anti-people’s measures, this Government has grown from power to power. Obscene amount of misappropriated figures keep floating out of CAG reports on a regular basis but there is no one who is doing enough to dislodge this Government. The last of the accused in the Telecom scam were bailed out last week. And just a day before that, a CAG report of way back 2009 resurfaced to tell you that the Telecom scam was no big deal if you were to compare it with the latest dada of all scams — the coal scandal! Apparently, it is a Rs 10.7 lakh crore scam! Now, what kind of figure is this? Can anyone really figure it out?

Well, as obscenities go, such unimaginable amounts of swindled public money would top the list. What will top this though will be the public’s uncanny ability to ignore it and go about its task of struggling to make two ends meet as a routine job, a price it pays for electing one unscrupulous Government after the other for lack of choice.

News is that the Government will be rolling back the petrol prices a bit by the end of the month. Now, this is one game it has played too many times. First increase it hugely and then cut down modestly. This means it manages to protect the amount it really wants to increase, in this case may be it was Rs 5 a litre. So now it will roll back Rs 2.5 and make merry. About time that such insults to public intelligence are done away with and there is none other than the public itself which can manage that by striking back. Till that happens, the Government will sit pretty with the likes of the Speaker doing Switzerland more times than you do your trips to the grocery store! And that’s when the value of rupee has nosedived as much as the economic happiness of the Indian population.

Some years ago, I remember buying a vegetarian burger in Harare for $2,000 and getting Zim dollars one lakh in exchange of just US$50. Fervently praying such times don’t visit my land of all that legendary milk and honey both of which, incidentally, already have steep price tags!

Despite the acute and sustained distress the Zimbabweans were unable to shed one dictator gone mad in Robert Mugabe. That, you must note, is just one man to tumble. Back in India, there’s an entire system to fight and defeat. One shudders to even think how Indians will ever be able to shed an entire system that has corruption running in its veins from top to bottom, how the DNA of such a system can ever be altered.

The doom and gloom looks rather permanent from where I see it and that’s the most alarming part of being in modern India, urban or otherwise.

Source: Published in The Sunday Pioneer, 27 May, 2012