‘In the national interest’ has been most heard in the last one week in our media than ever before, ‘I believe the Nuclear Deal is in the national interest’, ‘we need the energy for our future’, ‘this is strategically important for us’, etc. all being mouthed by people who suddenly want to mix emotions, national pride, loyalty, blind faith, meaningless morality and any other kind of sentiment to justify a policy decision that has its roots in science and technology. Even the normally sane looking Dayanidhi Maran was on television declaring his loyalty and reiterating his faith in the ‘wisdom of Manmohan Singh’ as the reasons for supporting the Nuclear ‘Deal’ (to the utter irritation of Ms. Gandhi that is what the nation calls it despite her insistence that it be called a agreement and not a deal).
I wouldn’t be surprised if there will be prayers to Gods and Godesses across the country that we sign the Nuclear deal and that the government survive. The other day there were reports of Sonia Gandhi being offered laddus from Tirupathi temple for precisely this reason!!! Electrical energy is a function of technology, technologies for producing energy are many and some of them are clean and some cheap, some are destructive to the environment and others not too destructive. Nuclear energy (after this deal) will make us depend external players for raw material, technology, regulation, usage and maybe even trading and charges. It is high technology dependent, requires extreme precaution in terms of safety and security, needs enormous amount of resources as initial investment and maintenance, is certainly not clean or green as the government advertisements claim and could leave residues that takes many thousands of years to dissipate.But, that is of least concern to the MPs, they are currently consumed by the single killer vote that they possess in their person.
Never has every insignificant MP felt so important and so sought after. The visual media is loving it too, post-IPL, they have been fighting among themselves for re-re-re-re-run of Ramayana and Mahabaratha for bolstering their TRPs and here is an opportunity to squeeze a live coverage to its maximum. All kinds of meaningless debates and even more meaningless surveys seem to be conducted by the media. One of them, which I briefly watched, had a survey of Muslims across metropolitan cities as to what they feel about the deal. That is the most stupid development in the media. Why are Muslims being asked an opinion based on their religion on an issue that is about energy and technology? Will we next ask Christians about their opinion on the Iran-Pakistan pipeline, because Iran has snubbed the Christian nations? Similarly will we seek the opinion of Buddhists before we protest against Sri Lanka for killing fishermen in the Tamilnadu coast? What kind of the insensitive media can come up with divisions such as energy for Indians and energy for Muslim Indians.This sure is the most macabre political theatre we are witnessing and the killer votes are shooting at our foundations of democracy and political life. We all may suffer this process as long as its eventual policy outcome.
E.O.M.
The Dont fully agree with the authors views, but many of you might.