Is ‘Yahapalanaya’ An Aborted Child Or Is It Still Birth Pangs?
By Vishwamithra1984 –October 26, 2016
“Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.” ~Christopher Lasch
Each passing day announces a deviation from the norm; each passing week signals a break from the bureaucracy’s usually pervasive disciplined message of transparency and accountability. Both transparency and accountability have come to be known as hackneyed phrases drastically exploited by politicians prior to elections and never followed up when they assume power. No democracy in the world, present or past has upheld the lofty ideals in total they tried to sell during an election campaign. Viewed purely as a marketing operation, election campaigning is essentially an operation that is launched in order to persuade voters to vote your way. As much as a travelling salesman knocks on a stranger’s door and commences his sales pitch to sell a lemon in a sugar-coated veneer as an orange, politicians and their surrogates and henchmen try to persuade the consumer, the voter, to buy what they don’t need. But the salesman tries his best to convince the voter of a dire want, instead of a realistic need, to buy and possess the product that he is trying to sell.
This unending process of buying and selling of a product whose substantive value is very much in question, despite the very short-lived shelf life of the plusses of the product, continues to trouble a conscientious voter and those who make their minds for the argument try to live with their choice with uncertainty and anxiety. Transparency and accountability are two sophisticated concepts that have been talked about, discussed and written books and essays about, especially during the last five or six decades. In a dictatorship or a monarchy, these two concepts did not have a chance of a snowball in hell to live longer than 24 hours. Governments and states that were not consistent with the fundamental principles of democratic elections and people’s participation never had to answer to an electorate whose values and measures are diametrically opposed to those who governed. A monarch assumed power of governance over his or her subjects by lineage while dictators merely came to occupy the seats of power through coercion, coup d’état or violent revolutions. Though they claim that the service of the people is their ultimate purpose, their modus operandi remains the subject of derision and denunciation of the subject people.
