Watching the 9 o clock news almost always leaves me depressed. I am convinced it is not for the faint-hearted. And I wish there was a channel only for good news – news without uncaring DGPs, news without war, news without child torture, news without death by violence. But I know equally well that there will be few sponsors for a channel like that, so I, for one, am stuck with depression. To come back to tonight’s news. The focus was on sheer lawlessness; a breakdown of law and order; indeed, a breakdown of basic governance. Let’s begin with Assam. The news of the molestation is as suddenly blanked out as it had appeared, the only lingering image being of the DGP who was casual, almost uncaring, in his responses to the news channels. The DGP of Bihar was no better. The only vestige of respectability was that he was not chewing paan with spittle trickling down one corner of the lips. He seemed least bothered that Pritam, a young lad of 25, was mercilessly hunted down by goons in broad daylight at a railway station after he complained to the cops about the theft of documents. Pritam’s father heaped the ultimate insult on the DGP within the limits of decency when he said pitifully, What can you expect when the highest police official tells lies! In Sitapur, UP, a DSP uncovers the face of a dead victim with his shoe, and is absolutely unrepentant when the news channels spoke to him. Worse, the CM of UP parried questions with a toothy smile. If the phrase ‘Heaping insult on injury’ was to be played out, it deserved an Oscar tonight. And what about Haryana – an HRD executive, legs broken so that he could not run, and set ablaze so decisively and viciously that he could be identified only by his teeth. The CM pretends to be helpless. Welcome, folks, to Jungle Raj!
In the early 17th century Thomas Hobbes wrote his epic on political science – Leviathan. Hobbes postulated what life would be like without government, a state of nature, as he called it. In that state, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world, and to do anything that he pleased. Without government life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.
We are heading towards that state.
