Part 1              Part 2

Seven phase election expected to kick start April 11. Most to all will be engaged in heated discussions, whom to vote, which party, why or why not, and how to vote. Depending on who you are or who you are talking to invariably discussion comes to the critical juncture with the question, who will you choose between Modi Vs Rahul? Huh!! If it had been TN Assembly election, question would have boiled down to similar binary, Kalaignar Vs JJ, 2 years back. Now it is Stalin Vs ?? From multiple discussions, what I figure out is that we love binaries. Not just in politics, in every other field. Rajni or Kamal, Vijay or Ajith, Sivaji or MGR, IR or ARR, Right or Left, Liberal or Conservative, BJP or Congress, Democrats or Republic, Socialism or Capitalism, Theist or Atheist, Hindu or Muslim, Veg or non-Veg, Us or Them, Mac or Windows, Android or iOS? Don’t we realize we make the wrong choices most of the time by going with binary narrative of our world view?

Why do we love binary view of the world? Binary mode keeps the world view simple. Takes less time to think which means less energy to be spent. Fast thinking puts less stress on the brain. Helps to box the people. If someone doesn’t like Rajni movies, he must be a Kamal fan. Not a Modi supporter, must be a Rahul guy. Oh, you are a liberal, that is why. You must be a Socialist. I know where it is coming from, you are a feminist. You are a so and so sympathizer. It is easy for all of us to have a simple view of the world, box the people based on few data points. World is not black and white. It is various shades of grey. Slow and critical thinking requires lots of energy and introspection. By evolution, we humans are tuned to fight vs flight mode. It helped when we lived in caves along with other animals. In the modern world we live in, we require fast thinking, fight or flight mode, only in emergencies like when there is Fire, in Operation Theaters. But we seem to employ that even for non-emergency situations, which is most of the time, since it requires less effort. Plus, most of the time we want to be in conformity with the bigger community or crowd we live in.

How much this binary approach has messed up our political scene 😢 By boiling the question to a simple binary like Kalaignar or JJ, voting population ends up voting for representatives looking at who would become CM. In the upcoming election, voting decision would be based on who they want to be PM at center. We end up choosing CM or PM rather than voting for the better of the lot in our constituency. Voters should be debating merits and demerits of their constituency representatives and make the choice without getting influenced by who would be CM or PM. Make the choice based on merits of the representatives irrespective of the party they belong to. One may say, more than party or CM/PM, it is the caste that is the deciding factor. IMO, that becomes irrelevant since every party knows the demography and select their candidates accordingly. They cancel out each other 🙂 Take a look at the TN Assembly representatives for the impact of making the decision based on who would be CM. Post JJ’s death, the government that runs is a mockery of democracy. BTW, this is not just in TN, in most of other states and the Center too.

It is wrong to blame the party for giving tickets to those representatives. It is us, the people, who need to take the blame. Most of the population still believe in mythological heroes, which is fine as long as it is limited to literature, but unfortunately that belief gets translated to looking for Leaders of mythological quality in political arena. A Leader who will come and provide a fix for all our problems. Democracy functions on representation, representatives have the highest responsibility, whether Assembly or Parliament. They need to be of leadership quality by themselves. In Indian system, elected legislatures choose the CM or PM. Quality of CM and PM depends on who we elect since we don’t directly elect PM and CM. Unless we move to choosing our local representatives based on their merits without getting influenced by which party or who would be CM or PM, we will continue to keep answering the wrong question and we fully deserve the representatives we end up with.