Inking the truth | Shivang Satya Gupta | Editor-in-Chief
Indian politics has been gripped by sudden spell of ink politics with the news of ink everywhere as if everyone in the country was in a bid to Ink The Truth.
At Earth News we reaffirm our commitment to ‘Inking The Truth’ but in true style and in a manner it is meant to be not the way the ink is being used these days.
The ink has attained new parameters in Indian democratic politics; during earlier days ink was used to express the emotions of any kind on paper and nowadays the same ink is being used to express the emotions of varied nature not on paper but on the faces of the people we don’t like. The ink now is being used not as a tool for penning down literature or the dissent but as a political tool by everybody from ruling party to the opposition with the ink throwers getting the political mileage from their respective constituencies and those getting faces blackened getting the sympathy of their targeted constituency. Throwing Ink on the opponent has become the new way of showing dissent in modern India. It all started with Yasin Malik and Sayeed Ali Shah Geelani some years back and then with Sudeendhra Kulkarni and Er Rasheed joining the fray at a time when beef controversy and attack on trucker is at its peak to reap the political harvest. The latest to join the fray is the new kid on the political block Arvind Kejriwal who faced the inking politics at a rally today even though he and his colleagues have been facing the inking politics for a long time. While throwing ink on somebody’s face is condemnable but on the other hand it is also the beauty of the democracy where people are using different and non violent means to express their anger in a democratic way. We must also understand that while democracy is around 300 years old in the world it is just 6 decades old in India which means the democracy in India is in its infancy and developing and expecting people here to act maturely is foolishness. How can one expect the people who have colonialism, monarchy and dynastic rule in their DNA to act as perfect democrats within six decades by following the rule of law that has been adopted from some other world which has a three hundred year old history of democracy and still not mature enough? The litterateurs returning awards on flimsy grounds is another example of infancy of democracy as no mature littérateurs can resort to such practice if he knows well the difference between literature and politics. It signifies that litterateurs are also immature and just in the infancy of the democracy enjoying the democratic largesse as otherwise where on earth can one expect the rulers looking the other way while people condemn them, resort to such tantrums and abusing the nation and its flag openly. It is only possible in democracies otherwise such people would have faced deaths in any dictatorship, monarchy or the theocratic states. But nobody seems to appreciate the fact that they are being allowed to get away with their tantrums only because we believe in democratic system even though we are just in its infancy. We are yet to educate ourselves about the real purpose of democracy and the education means the process in which behavior is reformed or modified which takes time. We are in the process of modifying ourselves and adjusting to the laws of the democracy hence we must not over react and let the things happen that happen non-violently by allowing the people express their emotions in a true democratic way. Because if returning awards is democracy so is the throwing ink on those whom a common man blames of taking him for a political ride and damaging the very basic foundations of the democracy.
