I guess the most poignant moment of last week must certainly be the return of the gallantry medals that were awarded to those
who warded off the December 13 attack on Parliament several years ago, only because they believe they or for that matter, the families of those who gave up their lives, have not been given either due respect or been shown the decisiveness that a case like this deserves. What makes matters worse is that the home minister stands up in Parliament and tells us that clemency petitions take up to seven years to be decided in a
country that has professed zero-tolerance for terrorism! This speaks poorly of our justice system, and even worse, about the manner in which we punish those who deserve punishment. But that is not the focus of this article. What is my concern is how everything is slowly being hijacked by an army of limousine liberals who have taken it upon themselves to intrude and intervene in every issue that doesn’t concern them. I have high regard for Arundhati Roy’s writing skills, but surely one God of Small Things doesn’t make her an authority on everything, from the amount of water that the Narmada dam must release to farmers’ rights in Singur. And we in this country are being held hostage by such seemingly brazen acts of care and concern which are nothing but repeated attempts in self-publicity. Medha Patkar is more of a disruptionist rather than someone who is seriously concerned about the issues she pretends to. Often we are lectured by these so-called activists who somehow want to be in the middle of every controversy yet will not engage in some serious development work. I am seriously tired of seeing Arundhati Roy and Medha Patkar sitting on silly hunger strikes and writing laborious essays on issues that they so easily give up when media attention wanes. So even if their intentions are noble (and I have no apparent reason to doubt them) the perception is that they are disruptionists and anarchists and this is my real concern, Sometimes, merely through association, the causes they lend themselves to start losing public empathy and support and this is something that must worry those cause managers who get these kind of
people to lend a shoulder. I have often noticed that eventually Medha Patkar’s brand looms larger than the cause and this is the real tragedy. We recently had an example of Sunita Narain becoming the sole arbiter of health and wellness in this country: she must obviously be well-intentioned, but just the shrillness and sensationalism of the case she put forth have made her perceptually much weaker than ever before. The same government which handed her the Padma Shri criticised her findings on the whole pesticide issue. The Tiger Task Force which she chaired was replete with fissures and all you need to do is ask the only tiger expert (or certainly one of them) Valmik Thapar as to what it was like having someone like Sunita chair a task force on tigers when she had never even seen one. For this the government must equally share the blame. Often the government uses these so-called NGO brands only because it believes they will silence an otherwise explosive media. But does the media really care? Obviously, they don’t. They are, in more cases than one, TRP driven, so this is the vicious circle that every normal Indian becomes a part of. To put it simply, you never know who to believe or what the agenda of these leaders is. I, for one, never know. I believe the time has come for these NGO stalwarts to give themselves a rest: they make enough money through unspecified sources of foreign funding; they run rackets in the form of administrative expenses and the real heroes remain forgotten. Why don’t you ever see a Bunker Roy on a hunger strike, or for that matter why didn’t Mother Teresa ever fast? For the simple reason they had serious work to do. They were not in it for the media attention. They were committed to helping people in the spirit of humanism. There is an orphanage in Kolkata: the Calcutta Muslim Girls Orphanage which has people like Mohamed Salim who despite being in politics gives much of his time as does the editor of this paper. There is no raving and ranting and abusing all and sundry. The NGO movement, while doing some remarkable stuff, has perhaps the wrong endorsers for its movement in India presently. They are typically people who you avoid only because you can’t stomach the fact that they see a dark lining in every silver cloud. The NGOs have to transform from being disruptionists and cynics to catalysts and enablers. But the ones who make a fetish of being opposers to everything good and fair, make me wonder where all this is going and for how much longer we are going to see Medha Patkar in every part of the country doing what she knows best: Looking for the nearest BBC correspondent to beam her pictures across the world so that donors know they made the right choice!
By: Suhel Seth / Source: The Asian Age