"If this democracy faces its greatest peril from someone, it is from the tyranny of the unelected and the unelectable" –
No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent. Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Piranhas are known to be extremely ferocious predators. They also have another important role to play in the ecological set up within which they operate, they are expert scavengers too. No longer are the Piranhas confined to the Amazon basin, they exist in plenty in our own country. They manage, they lead and they raise their ugly heads and devour the small minnows in a hapless fashion in order to satiate their voracious appetite. And just in case the small minnows decide to come together to tackle the giant piranhas, then the minnows get attacked by a school of cannibalistic piranhas. The minnows are helpless and face the brunt of the bloody aggression, either they retreat timidly or continue to bleed slowly. But can this be changed? Can the minnows fight the Piranhas? The Piranhas believe they cannot.
The Home Minister finally speaks and it is not the announcement everyone has been waiting for. Not only did he ban the Bersih rally by refusing to grant its organisers a permit, he sinisterly called them to the the Bukit Aman headquarters for a grilling.
This has upset many civil society leaders, who are not part of the Bersih movement, although they support the principles of the rally, which basically is a call to Malaysians to insist that Prime Minister Najib Razak ensures free and fair elections.
"By refusing to issue a permit is to make it illegal. So to punish those who take part is very unfair. Why should the permit be withheld in the first place? By doing so, the government will be seen as forcing the people to take part in an illegal activity," Ramon Navaratnem, past president of Transparency International told Malaysia Chronicle.
"My advice is to let the rally proceed. This is the people's fundamental right under the Constitution. Sure, there will be trouble and crowd control will be tough. But that is the job of the police. Let them do it. Everyone has their role to play in our society. The rakyat or populace, the NGOs, the government and the police."
But to Hishammuddin Hussein, the Home Minister who is also Najib's cousin, the Bersih rally is 'evil'. He tried to show he is fair by not only banning Bersih but also Malay rights group Perkasa and the UMNO Youth. However he only drew criticism as both Perkasa and UMNO Youth are linked to his political party UMNO. He further insists that his priority is the safety of the people.
“My statement today is that all three parties will not be granted permits to gather on that date. I am saying that categorically, all three of them will not get it. I have already stated that immediate action must be taken on this matter and police will call all parties involved because although we have said that we are not going to grant them permits, the statements from Perkasa, UMNO Youth or Bersih, indicate that they plan to proceed," Hisham said on Wednesday.
Behind the shadow-play of Hisham's words
A heroic stance by one who has been so late in stating the government’s stand on the Bersih 2.0 march.
If it is true that the safety of the people are the priority of the Home Minister, than it is only right that any form of racial discord be stopped and any association that promotes such a discord be disbanded and its leaders punished.
Yet, Hishamuddin fails to say if any action will be taken against Perkasa chief Ibrahim Ali for his racist remarks towards the Chinese. Must the Home Minister be reminded that it was Ibrahim Ali who brought the racial context into an event that is peaceful and devoid of any connection to race nor religion.
The best Hishamuddin can conjure up is to have the police round up everyone involved and give them a slap on the wrist. Thus, Ibrahim Ali is allowed another day to spread his brand of poison against the Chinese.
Again it is a clear case of a minister seeking to save whatever dignity the current establishment has over the matter. A scant reminder on how desperate they are in trying to look as if they have control over the populace.
This pre-emptive action has been seen by many as a plan hatched by UMNO from the very beginning. UMNO’s hand is seen in the prompting of Perkasa to create trouble and thus warrant the intervention of the police.
And in showing that they are too taking action against UMNO Youth, the police and Home Minister can later claim that they had been fair in their conduct.
No one is fooled
Perkasa has, so far, license to create all manner of trouble with the added guarantee that no hard-handed action will be taken against it. Ibrahim Ali is thus allowed to burn effigies, warn off the Chinese and proclaim his brand of jihad against the Christians of Malaysia.
Such weak-handed action by the Hishamuddin and the police would only fuel the anger, the people would have towards the BN government that has refused to tackle the obvious.
The BN government is applying double standards when dealing with those associated with the opposition while their allies, like Perkasa, are deemed 'angels' even if they are as guilty as hell.
Hishamuddin should correct his statement. It is not the safety of the people that is his priority but instead the political survival of UMNO and their interests.
For this, he is willing to bend over and close his eyes to Ibrahim Ali’s actions at the expense of the people he is suppose to protect.
Dear Elected Leader
Yes, today you are the Elected one, holding office at the Centre, no less, while those troubling the tranquility of your tenure are largely Unelected or Unelectable. Having said that:
Does Bill Clinton still not grasp that the current economic crisis is in large measure his legacy? Obviously that's the case, or he wouldn't have had the temerity to write a 14-point memo for Newsweek on how to fix the economy that never once refers to the home mortgage collapse and other manifestations of Wall Street greed that he enabled as president.
Endorsing the Republican agenda of financial industry deregulation, reversing New Deal safeguards, President Clinton pursued policies that in the long run created more damage to the American economy than any other president since Herbert Hoover, whose presidential tenure is linked to the Great Depression. Now, in his Newsweek piece, Clinton has the effrontery to once again revive his 1992 campaign mantra, "It's the economy, stupid," as the article's title without any sense of irony, let alone accountability. But that has always been the man's special gift -- to rise above, and indeed benefit from, the messes he created.
His list of safe nostrums -- painting tar-surface roofs white and seeking more efficient solar and battery production -- to be featured at his lavishly funded Clinton Global Initiative conference in Chicago next week is vintage Clinton hype. All of those solutions are of the win/win sort that he loved to ballyhoo as president; who in his or her right mind would be against green job creation? But that hardly speaks to a crisis in which, as was reported Tuesday, the housing meltdown continues unabated as the toxic mortgages sold and packaged by the leading banks and investment houses clog the real estate market, destroying consumer confidence and hobbling job creation.
Conceding that the bailed-out banks are sitting on $2 trillion that they won't lend, Clinton offers not a word about mortgage relief for swindled homeowners. With an all-time high of 44 million Americans living below the poverty line, Clinton once again brags of his success in ending the federal welfare program.
There is only a one-sentence reference in the Clinton article to the era of financial greed: "The real thing that has killed us in the last 10 years is that too much of our dealmaking creativity has been devoted to expanding the financial sector in ways that don't create new businesses and more jobs and to persuading people to take on excessive debt loads to make up for the fact that their incomes are stagnant." Now that's a clear description of the consequence of President Clinton's policy of radical deregulation of the financial industry, but he writes as if that outcome has nothing to do with him.
Clinton signed off on the reversal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the legislative jewel of the Franklin Roosevelt administration designed to prevent financial institutions from getting too big to fail. In signing the Financial Services Modernization Act, which broke down the barrier between high-rolling Wall Street investment firms and consumer banks carrying the deposits of ordinary folk, Clinton gushed in 1999, "Over the [past] seven years we have tried to modernize the economy... And today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority."
The first beneficiary of that legislation was Citigroup, a corporation that resulted from a merger that would have been banned by Glass-Steagall. Upon signing the law, Clinton handed one of the pens he used to a beaming Sandy Weill, Citigroup CEO and a close friend and financial supporter of the president. Clinton's treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, then went off to be a $15-million-a-year exec at Citigroup and was in a key position there when the bank made those toxic derivative packages that would have forced it into bankruptcy had U.S. taxpayers not bailed the bank out.
So much for the "modernizing" that Clinton had bragged about.
A year later a variation of that same word appeared in the title of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Clinton signed and which exempted from government regulation all of the collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps that would later prove so toxic. That legislation led to the explosion of the market in unregulated mortgage-based securities, the key source of the financial-sector "dealmaking" that Clinton now bemoans.
In his memoir Clinton pays tribute to Rubin as "the best and most important treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton." He wrote that line in 2004, when Rubin, who had come to Clinton from a top job at Goldman Sachs and later left for Citigroup, was already clearly defined as someone who profited mightily from the very bills that he had pushed through while working for Clinton.
As with so much in the Clinton record, the former president remains in deep denial over having any culpability for his misdeeds. In his thousand-page memoir there is no reference to the above-mentioned radical deregulation of the economy that he presided over. As evidenced by his Newsweek article, the man has long been convinced that there is no problem or contradiction of his that cannot be simply plastered over with blather. Sadly, he may be right.
- We all know that you were elected to power. So there’s little point quoting that day in and day out. If you hadn’t been elected to power there was no way in hell you would have had a chance to take all those decisions that the courts have been striking down one after another, or to have run amok assuming there’ll be nothing to pay. There’s no point in the priest charged with molesting kids telling others he’s a holy man, is there? We know. That’s exactly why there’s outrage.
- We also all know that the Left was elected, not once but repeatedly, over and over again, and you thought that what it did amounted to state terror and goondaism. When your allies fought tooth and nail to oppose decisions taken by the Elected government of the day, when people denied access to officials of the Elected government of the day, you did not find that to be a threat to democracy, did you?
- Kalyan Singh was the elected CM of his state when Babri happened. Narendra Modi was the elected CM of his state when the riots happened, and then was re-elected. That did not stop you from tearing into them, over and over again. ‘Civil society’ training its guns on leaders whom it accuses of communalism is fine; when it trains its guns on regimes not just charged, but for all practical purposes found with their hands in the till, that’s undemocratic?
- The tyranny of the unelected, as you describe it, is a recent phenomenon. And frankly, no offence to the gentlemen in the forefront of it, the simple fact is that most of us don’t trust the Elected, contradictory as it may be, and we look for people who will stand up to them, and the first ones who made any noticeable effort in that direction rode the wave of anti-Elected sentiment. Anna and Baba have not built the sentiment; the sentiment has made them what they are today. So don’t shoot the messengers, in whatever form they are delivering it to you; get the message instead. And, frankly, you haven’t faced much. An Assange at work here would make things really interesting.
- When your youth leader goes to protest against land acquisition in Noida, saying he’s talking on behalf of the farmers, to the best of our understanding, the government taking the action is an elected one, and nobody’s appointed your leader as the head of the farmers’ union or any such entity. Is that, then, a quasi-civil society threat to the democratic framework of UP?
- Hazare may be an RSS mask. Ramdev may be an RSS mask too. So be it. If the RSS is the most active body looking for accountability in public life, is willing to instigate the public resentment at the brazenness and suffocating extent of corruption in public life in our system, Godspeed the RSS. In attributing responsibility for the entire campaign to the RSS, you are doing more for its image than any PR campaigner could have. We have acquired greater respect for the RSS if it’s the sole entity causing you unease.
- Don’t preen too much over being among the Electables, honestly. The TIME list of most influential 100 in the world had 5 names from India this year - Dhoni, Mukesh Ambani, VS Ramachandran, Aruna Roy, Azim Premji. None of them were among the Elected. In fact, some of them couldn’t care less for the Elected, and some can, well, manage the Elected very comfortably. Electability, you see, can be overrated – especially by the Electables.
- The prominent among the Elected may not have been in the TIME list, but many of them are in other lists. From Kani and Raja, from Lalu to Pappu Yadav, from Shibu Soren to Koda, the tradition in recent years has been an illustrious one. Am not sure how aspirational it is to be among the Elected and the Electable. So please spare us the philosophy of the Elected fighting to preserve noble democratic ideals. It may have sounded legit, coming from a Gandhi or a Patel in 1947; today, it’s, at best, comic.
Ergo, we don’t think that the greatest peril the democracy faces is from the “tyranny of the unelected and unelectable”. The greatest peril the democracy faces is from a problem that we don’t have an answer for, yet – and we’re fumbling for answers – the problem that, increasingly, our Electedare the Unelectable.
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