By the evening of Friday, 21 April, the Karnataka ministry had got derailed: it stood dismissed, the state assembly dissolved, and president's rule imposed. "It is a consequence", informed us the home minister, "of value politics." A play upon words that amused less than it saddened. "It is a Congress conspiracy," predictably said all of us in the opposition, "an assault on our democratic rights".

The two houses then hotly debated motions for a 'recall' of governor Venkatasubbiah, implying severe parliamentary censure. They were, of course, defeated. A bandh called for 27 April passed off with only 'minor incidents'. "Our suc-cess, therefore," with some justification claimed a union minister from Karnataka.

The prime minister, accompanied by Buta Singh, immediately thereafter 'Air-dashed', as they say, to Bangalore and utilised the opportunity to call his political opponents names: "smugglers, murderers, telephone tappers, horse-traders" and such other vivid phraseology of which only he is capable.

"And how do you react to all these happenings in your home state?" I asked the venerable R.K. Narayan. "With indifference," he said wearily, "Mysore is so far from Bangalore". And that is perhaps as telling a comment on the entire episode as we can expect. Because the fault, alas, despite that astrological transit of the sun, does not lie in the stars, it lies within us, in our thinking and in the deeds of our politicians.

Demeaning the nation

We must, therefore, call all our politicians to account, of whatever hue. How dare they demean the nation? In the manner in which they do? All this pettifoggery and tub and chest thumping and criminalisation of the polity — for how long is this to go on?

That is why the Karnataka episode is so telling. After all, no one has come out well from it — not our presidential or gubernatorial heads. Not parliament. Neither the government nor the opposition. So, what is wrong, where exactly does the problem lie? A truly objective answer does perhaps lie somewhere deeper: a country and a society that for the past forty years has lived with this handed down absurdity that is dynastic succession, thus in a state of deliberately induced torpor. A society whose tiniest fold of particularity has been abused politically, after which colossally misruled, deprived thereafter of incentive, a sense of belonging, and participation in this exciting challenge of forging a country anew, in consequence of being a part of that very change that all of us so yearn for, a people systematically kept in isolation from information, indeed constantly assaulted by disinformation, therefore repressed: perhaps, that society and country do not any longer know how to fight for their political rights. Perhaps, we have forgotten that it is our right to be governed well by those whom we elect for the purpose, and that it is our further right to call to account these very representatives when they fail in their responsibilities, and most important, that we can actually sack them if we do not like how they go about their job.