Just how did the RWA allow AAP/BJP cadres inside my housing complex? Asks IP Extension resident Anoothi Vishal.
It was the days before the social media took over our lives. In fact, even television was not 24x7. We watched it in moderation—Wednesday’s Chitrahaar, the Sunday movie, Byomkesh Bakshi, Star Trek and Prannoy Roy’s The World This Week on Fridays. So the news that the Babri Masjid had been demolished came a bit slower than it would have in these Twitter-happy days.
That December 6, my friend Suruchi called me up to say that there would be no school the next day because of the happenings in Ayodhya. We were in Lucknow, students of La Martiniere, and became instantly happy at this intrusion of the abnormal into our humdrum routines. For several days after, there was no school. There were talks of riots, a sense of fear and foreboding in our middle-class neighbourhood, but as kids all this only meant excitement.
My tutor, “Vasudevan uncle”, who taught us math and physics after school, handed out badges one evening: “I am pro-Mandir”, these shiny ones read. The standard greeting we exchanged henceforth with him became not, “good evening, uncle”, but “Jai Shri Ram”. In our early teens then, we were unaware of the politics of it all.
Photo: Northcountrypublicradio.org
Today, I cringe at that memory and feel angered by it. At no point have I been a supporter of the politics of hate and discrimination. But our childish innocence then was used as a tool to carry forward a message that wasn’t ours at all! It was propaganda, though we could not have spelt that word then.
Today’s politics does much worse. A day or two ago, I was appalled to see cadres of the BJP and AAP get permission to enter our housing society’s complex, raise loud slogans, send us messages on our private mobile numbers asking for support (how did the society give them our numbers, if it did, without permission? isn’t it a breach of privacy?) asking for support but worse use little children for propaganda.
The kids were enticed by shiny new whistles—much like we were by those badges - and happily chanted slogans with these political folks. They were told to go spread the message to their parents and families. What messages can 10-years-old convey? How much of the political complexity can they understand? Why then should they be used as fodder for publicity? No one has thought to ask.
Photo: Amazon.co.uk
It is not against the law to canvass in neighbourhoods like this, but to use children and their trusting the naivety to spread political messages they cannot comprehend, is evil. It is for a reason that the voting age is 18 years, not 5 years. Political parties have been known to use all sorts of inducements to get to their potential voters — from chaat parties thrown in RWA offices to promises of freebies— but this is a new low.
Society management committees are apolitical entities — they are essentially management panels, who have been voted in to run the cooperative residential societies smoothly. Should the political leanings of the president or secretary be foisted upon the rest of the neighbourhood? How on earth is permission given to outsiders to come and canvass door-to-door, especially in these days when security risks are so high? And why are these people whose credentials go unverified allowed to chat up little children? Does this not scare you?
In Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia, children were brainwashed by totalitarian states and used not just for propaganda but to turn informers on their parents, families and friends. If political parties with power get into our homes and into schools – spaces where young minds who are not voters yet should be allowed to develop independently and in amity with all types of people with diverse religions, politics and languages — is this not going to encourage convenient mass politicisation by those in power?
It’s a future too scary to think of.
(Resident of Technology Apartment, Anoothi Vishal is a well-known journalist and a food critic)
