Andolanjeevis: Dream World parahumans

In rather a truculent manner, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi has turned the limelight on a profession that has been eating into India’s base for a long time. The Andolanjeevis or the perennial professional agitators have been in existence for a long time, or, to be exact, since the time Marx and Lenin made the chimera of communism so fashionable.

As the PM pointed out in the Parliament on Monday, such Andolanjeevis crop up everywhere in public life and without any reason or logic. Their raison d’etre is opposing anything that happens normally around them and is not twisted and distorted.

They are professional unhappy persons, who try to blame every ill on either the government or the system or the people around them, but never themselves and their own unwillingness to work. They thrive in distortion and dehumanising conditions. They wait for humans to suffer so that they can make the most out of it, the way fungus prospers in rot.

After the PM’s jibe on andolanjeevis, there are many from the clan who are claiming that even Gandhi and other freedom fighters were like them and believed in agitations to achieve freedom. They are comparing themselves with Nelson Mandela too.

Their hedonism needs no attention because this is what separates them from normal people. They romanticise everything that is harmful for humans. They would pose themselves as Winston Churchill by smoking cigars.

They forget that in a democratic set up votes are the biggest and possibly the best way to show disagreement and agitation. And that it is not very progressive to invent the wheel again. Indians fought for freedom and democracy and achieved it. Now to pretend that Indians should again repeat Sepoy Mutiny to take India ahead would be nothing but thuggery of top grade.

It is normal to disagree with a government in power. It is also okay to show disagreement with any government’s decisions by holding protests. And to register protests more strongly there is a Parliament, there is media and there are several other fora from academia to judiciary.

However, to expect that one group can blackmail and force a government in power to scrap laws passed by the legislative body is too Marxist-Leninist. What if another group starts agitating for just the opposite? Will issues be resolved through show of street power?

Those who do not believe in democracy usually expect too much from democracy. In their own little fiefdoms, they are more dictatorial than Che Guevara and Lenin.

It is good that the Indian people have rejected such useless agitators again and again. Indian democracy would move ahead only by keeping such elements on the fringes.