From the last General Election to the Karnataka election held in May this year, the trend has deteriorated and the standard of public discourse in the country has reached the drainage level.
GERRY LOBO OFM
As the summer heat wave soared almost to the boiling level this April, the political heat wave also reached to a point when leaders loud-mouthed not only rhetoric but also vomited crass jibes at opponents as electioneering took place with magnificent road shows and public meetings. False, partisan and communal statements were made during this campaign which created a climate of hate leading to burning of party flags and public property by some fringe groups. In recent years, the language used by public figures has become vicious and personal. The aggressive rhetoric is often based on half-truth. Instead of bringing people together, the offensive or inappropriate language used b y political leaders only breeds anger, hatred and division in society.
Highly undesirable and insulting language used by those holding high offices in our country these days not only towards opposition parties but also against the opposing social and religious groups has become a common phenomenon. Our respected Prime Minister some years ago branded the Congress party as “termites.” Aam Aadmy Party leader had once called the Prime Minister “a coward and a psychopath.” Sonia Gandhi had once remarked about the incumbent government and its leaders as “merchants of death.” When the present Prime Minister was the Chief Minister of Gujarat, he named Sonia Gandhi as a “Jersey Cow.” Sadly enough our Prime Minister never misses an opportunity to run down and poke sarcastic fun at Rahul Gandhi. The latter, in his turn, is no less in running down the Prime Minister; so much so, that he seemed to have defamed the surname ‘Modi’ for which he is punished by law and disqualified as the Member of Parliament.
The Congress President, Mallikarjuna Kharge, naming the Prime Minister as a “poisonous snake” or his son, Priyanka Kharge, calling the Prime Minister as “Nalayaka” (Inept or Useless Son) or the Karnataka Minister, B.P.Yatnal naming Sonia Gandhi as “Visha Kanya” (Venemous Woman) during the election campaign, do not speak well of educated and public faces in our country. The often call for “Congress Mukt Bharat” by the Prime Minister and some other stalwarts is a reflection of non-democratic stand and an authoritarian ideological aggression and does not in any way speak of a distinct statesman in high position. In a democratic set up which our country has stood for 75 years, the Prime Minister should in no way contribute to a political discourse which advocates for an opposition-free country. Nehru once wrote: “In public life we must presume the bona fides of each other…I trust that all our criticisms will be based on policy and not on personalities.”
It seems to me that many political leaders are regularly using offensive languages in public, particularly during the election campaigns, as is the case during the Karnataka election season, to show they are expressing their true feelings and to project themselves as different from their opponents. Everyone is claiming to speak the truth but one discovers only hypocrisy and blatant lies. As someone calls it, it is the ‘foul truth by the loud-mouthed politicians.’ It is only a populist rhetoric and narrow interest in electoral politics. This has become the present day political culture consisting of anger and abuse. Our statesmen have become political masters using as many baseless accusations and all the wrong words. From the last General Election to the Karnataka election held in May this year, the trend has deteriorated and the standard of public discourse in the country has reached the drainage level.
“Democracy does not mean holding and winning elections. The quality of a country’s democracy is judged by the way leaders and managers of democratic institutions publicly adhere to democratic norms and values in principle and in practice. The language used by political leaders in a segmented democratic country needs to reflect decency and respect for differences of views and opinion; and inevitability, importance of other political groups…. When public discourse of a country gets vicious and partisan, democratic polity as a whole starts to fall apart,” states Ashok Swain (Professor of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, Sweden).
Questions of free speech have become particularly fraught in the age of social media. Alarms have been sounded regarding the use of inappropriate language. What the political correctness as a form of censorship for the right wing is, for the left it is a means of striving for a safe and inclusive language. However the pivotal question is: where do we draw the line? We are free to speak, but not without consequences. We also want, and arguably deserve, to see exemplary behaviour from our elected representatives both within the Parliament and outside the house of democracy. There seems to be no universal code of conduct which is established and upheld which in turn lets the politicians speak their tongue. And that’s a shame.
According to historians the ancient Greece is the first example of democratic society. In this same period there was the rise of the sophists’ – a group who offered to teach people for the sake of earning money. The sophist’s education centred on language; they taught people to become masters of persuasion. Essentially training their pupils to use rhetoric to talk themselves out of different situations, many of which related to legal disputes, was their intent.
Today, this same technique is employed by politicians in all countries. They use political lingo and spiel to disguise clear meaning and hide genuine sentiment. Of all the faults of political language, perhaps the biggest is freely throwing out disrespectful and defaming language with strong and cutting names. Under the cloak of rhetoric, real decisions with real consequences are hidden. By the use of this rhetoric our leaders evade accountability. Well, there may be no perfect solution to the question of language in the political discourse and debate. However one should begin with being a little less outraged and be of no profanity, and a little more concerned about the human person who represents human people by keeping politics from the real person and his or her honour.
One must remember that the words sent out into the public sphere by political personnel create ripples. The more high profile the speaker is, the bigger those ripples become, almost leading up to a flame of fire. Politicians particularly in our country must learn to set a tone deciding what is or is not a decent language on public appearance. When a high-profile politician makes racist comments, for example, then, inevitably, the public will also feel validated in repeating the same sin, as it has become so common in our Indian society today. Let us know that offensiveness does exist when bad language is used to defame another person. Human persons, after all, are made of flesh and blood, not of wood or stone!
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