I’m a strong believer of democracy because I don’t have another alternative to strongly believe in. But that doesn’t mean I’m in agreement with majority bullying minorities, I value rights of minorities of all types, as long as they don’t hold hundreds of neutrals* hostages in traffic jams by conducting rallies in cities to score over their majority counterparts. This post is on some of the challenges our country is facing today because of having too many kinds of majorities and their corresponding minorities with many unfortunate neutrals getting caught in between.
As I stated earlier, I respect minorities, be it the religious, racial, trans-racial, cultural, trans-cultural, genderal(a better word than ‘sexual’, which makes me feel ‘harassment’ follows), trans-genderal, linguistic, professional, physiological, psychological, habitual … the list goes on which means I got to respect almost anybody because everybody is some or other type of minority in our country. Now that more and more of these minorities are coming out of the closets where they claim the majority had hitherto locked them in, I think the government should take a strong stand on their rights and wrongs to avoid majority-minority tussles.
What is the most essential thing a typical minority needs? Freebies? Job reservations? Educational concessions? Or is it constitutional equality? All these can be arranged easily by amendments in the law, which is easy. But if the problem is the attitude of majority towards them (neutrals are neutralized, they have no attitude, no emotional attachments, no particular affinity towards anything anyway), then we got to plan better because that involves a lot of work. We might have to try all four ancient political methods - Sama, Dana, Bheda, Danda (in the reverse order as we always do) – to stop the majority’s discrimination against the corresponding minority. Let me explain why this is difficult with a scenario study(Please note that the scenario is fictitious, any resemblance to any majority/minority living or dead could be because you are a pervert).
Say you are a member of majority who think men are men and women are women, and children are of both, by both, for both is the only possible ‘genderal’ orientation. For argument sake let’s call this majority as ‘the shortsighted’. It’s not that easy to educate you that among other groups of people things are not that simple, there men can be either men or women and women can be either women or men and some men and women can be both while some others can be neither, depending on what the situation demands. This many permutations and combinations are simply too much for (majority) shortsighted to accept because they are all bad in math.
Now the question is how do we educate them? Can we have school text books changed? That means Kabil Sibal and his team got to do hell a lot of rework on the present education system that they are already planning to mess-up, especially places where we teach morality, religion, physiology, anatomy and stuff like that. Now even if we decide to educate the younger generation of ‘shortsighted’ against discrimination, what about their adults? Mr.Sibal has no control on them, he cannot bring them back to school except for the usual Parent-Teacher pandemonium, unless of course somebody sues all the ‘shortsighted’ adults and hires Mr.Sibal as the attorney.
Now let us look at the possible ways to influence adults. One option is by using Mr.Chidambaram and his forces to force them to accept the minorities, but this is 21st century and we are a democracy, Mr.Chidambaram will not do anything that will get his party voted out in the next election, public is simply too aware these days. The other option is to hire Amitab Bachchan, Rajani Kant and the likes to run ad campaigns. Again a lot of adults are not fans of movie stars, who will influence them? Can we hire Bollywood item-girls to do the job? I doubt because there is a limit to how much flesh somebody can eat, also what about ‘shortsighted’ adult women? Bollywood’s Chest-nut item-boys look too dumb to influence their own girlfriends, let alone somebody else.
Now, there is another future problem as well. Say somehow we managed to play a lot of cards – Mr.Sibal, Mr.Chidambaram, Mr.Bachchan, Miss.Fleshly, Mr.Chestnut etc – and somehow managed to make the majority accept the minority. Then what if the majority transform to minority - like what happened in the case of religions in the past - seeing the privileges, freedom etc that the minority enjoy? Don’t we have to again start from scratch (our own backs I mean) to safeguard the majority who now became a minority? That’s why I say the majority-minority equation in our country needs a clear strategy to handle; it’s a very complicated problem, more complicated than even Rakhi Sawant's Swayamvar I would say.
Unfortunately, I’m not a philosopher, political thinker/tinker, think tank, water tank or not even a tv-expert to suggest a solution to this ever prevailing problem, all I can say is this majority vs minority is an issue that needs more government attention, it needs a permanent solution that takes care of the interests of both minorities and majorities of all kinds, at the same time protect the neutrals who just want to live their lives, pay their mortgages, bring up their children and die.
*Neutrals - those who enjoy neither majority, nor minority status and privileges.
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