Authoritarianism is on the rise as the democratic values seem to be systematically sabotaged with crooked view on profits over people. Most of us are unaware of how our reality is being constructed carefully through perception tracking mechanisms and customized visualization of consumerism at large. Several people train themselves to sense the nuances of cosmopolitan consumerist network intruding their privacy through social media, but sometimes become victims of the same network.
Elections occur only when there is a realistic campaigning done to establish a network of party workers who can channelize the best by talking to people at large. Campaign strategies have gone out of hands of party supremos to the corporate houses who employ psephologists and media-managers by studying the patterns of voting in several countries.
It seems essential to garner the media support and do some PR work without any hesitation, if a political party has determined to stay in power irrespective of the economic and political changes occurring in the contemporary society. However, several media critics have specified the need for moral accountability and political acumen to actualize the will of the popular mandate. A few cronies will never do so instead sell their conscience for money.
The acceleration of political bickering and the sudden disruption of legislative business could be considered very common among the entire political class across the continents. The politics of representation dwells on the politics of crisis management to a great extent as the hunger for power goes along with the appetite for amassing wealth with industrialist and criminal nexus.
There are several image management companies at work to keep the publicity campaigns of a few political leaders who may have been ousted from the public life because of their historical blunders. None seems to know how the media managers stifle the facts and dismal performance of these Tughlaqs, besides making them win several electoral battles.
Most of the honest statesman appear to be hoodwinked by the populist politics of utter cronyism and unethical usurpation promoted by biased scribes. It is important to sustain such political savagery with ethical and unbiased reports everywhere. The dearth of talented but honest political smarties may be the reason for this sudden leverage of vitiated political atmosphere across the world.
Some of the brilliant legacies are born out of crisis in social and political discourse. Hero-worship is the essence of any authoritarianism turning its face towards derailing democratic policies and processes of governance with apparent pathway to oligarchy. The gameplan of oligarchy is to thwart the remarkable processes of leadership through the choice or the prudent mandate of the people by dismantling the pillars of a democratic society such as the dissenting voices of the independent intellectuals or free media. Divergent perspectives of a polity can subtly lead to analytical bend of mind to be inherited by the entire team of leaders across the political spectrum. Ideologies are sometimes blinkers tiptoed on the system of blind obligation and execution, without lending space to the varied stances or unpopular confrontations. Simulations of the most powerful systems of governance ought to keep in mind the legacies of the unlettered and marginal sections of the subalterns too.
The prototype of a democratic electioneering could be based on absolute equations of equality benchmarked with specific guidelines of any election management and monitoring authority. More often the mechanisms of monitoring needn’t seemingly favour any incumbent regimes or the principal opposition groups in general. However, a judicious ethical audit of such organizations is essential today to strengthen democracy and its pluralistic representations everywhere.
There have been innumerable instances of ideological battles fought with easy exchange of money or power, wherein the local patriarchs or matriarchs of these political formations reinvent their political identities in no time. Even their rivals are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea to witness a quantum leap orchestrated in the shadows of lobbyists. We could see an evolution of political turncoats willing to join anyone at any time just for a position or wealth.
The emergence of campaign management companies is to be seen as a threat to the real service-oriented party workers or local leaders at the ground level, whose leadership elevation is now conditioned by the amount of money paid to the political Megastars of their party. None bothers about inner party rivalries these days. Every one of these so-called power mongers appears to stand on a wheel of fortune built upon corruption to the core. It might be misfortune to many but for them, it is all about a new road to riches beginning there.
Names of these political parties change but the system of corruption does not undergo any meaningful transition to accommodate the honest and forthright political leaders. Metamorphosis of the meticulously constructed realities convolute our mind with fantasies of the populist sops to attract the poorest masses. You may see a vast amount of psephologists, ethnic psychologists, political analysts and PR experts working round the clock to make the wild fantasies of the oligarchs into a reality.
Nothing remains the same once you become the most powerful Caesar willing to sideline any ignoble or noble Brutus. All of us know about the end of Shakespeare’s protagonist resulting in chaos. A few of us may think through the same and assert–“Order emerges out of chaos”. The contextual assumptions of cultural superiority/inferiority are inextricably bound to be part of any indigenous political tradition enveloping the horizons of free conceptual construction.
Nobody can predict the end of any war so easily. We should avert all possibilities for the next world war only if we stay out of these draconian hero-worship happening everywhere in the name of celebrating the traditions of democracy. A leader has to be accessible even to the poorest people.
The author is a corporate trainer, course developer and curriculum consultant.