63. Politics

Politics means putting the gun on some one else's shoulder and you pulling the trigger. He suffers the recoil and you get the target. For more information, watch the movie SARKAR, both parts. Politics means, a basket of crabs. When one crab tries to crawl out of the basket the others pull him down. Politics means progress of self and not the interest of the nation. This is a method where the ruling party uses a system of asking the various sides in an argument to put forward their own ideas and then trying for find a CONSENSUS, which is a agreement that all parties can AGREE with. By getting all sides to contribute their own ideas, the final agreement is built with input from all sides of the question, rather than one group over-ruling all the others, with their power.

Consensus is a hall mark of a mature nation's ability to make good laws with agreement from all sides of the political spectrum. Having spent a good part of my life in the trenches, I long ago arrived at an answer that I thought reflected reality and was sufficiently cynical to make me believable. Politics, I would tell them, is about power: getting it, keeping it, and using it to advance one's agenda. At least, that's what I said until I ran across a comment by the eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who died recently. He had a different, and far more useful, answer. Politics is about "the search for remedy," he said. We live at a time when such a belief seems outdated and hopelessly earnest.

Americans have watched their politicians over the years with increasing skepticism, and come to the belief that politics is about anything but an honest effort to resolve the issues that confront us. It's about personal egos. It's about enriching oneself. It's about winning elections or wielding power for its own sake. What Schlesinger invited us to do was to search beneath the definitions we've given politics over the years, and to find an underlying purpose. All those "abouts" you hear now — it's about ego, it's about money, it's about power — are partly true, or at least, true in certain cases. But they're inadequate when it comes to describing what politics in a democracy is truly about: It's how we wrestle with and try to resolve the challenges that confront us.

Discussion about politics in the World's largest democracy – INDIA: With less than one hundred days to go for the general elections in India, people who were expecting the usual salvos from the political leaders from one another were quite a bit taken aback when it came from Nirvachan Sadan - the home of Election Commission of India. The Chief Election Commissioner of India N. Gopalaswami wrote to President Pratibha Patil with a recommendation that Navin Chawla, Gopalaswami's colleague at the Election Commission be removed from the post of Election Commissioner, accusing him of bias. Gopalaswami's letter was of 93 pages, detailing the reasons for his recommendation along with 500+ pages of annexure. Gopalaswami's recommendation, coming as it does on the eve of general elections, has plunged the Election Commission in to a crisis, and not just that, it’s also is a litmus test for the government.