Democracy/ Human Rights

I was watching BBC program, Question Time Shanghai.

There was discussion centered around human rights issues and what struck me was, what is the essential thing about human rights

I think it is always the question of issues of minority against majority..

Question of ruled ones against rulers….

We human beings have been thru many experiments in governance throughout the history of civilization and pre-civilization.

And experiments still continue….

There is so much hue and cry about democracy….

But the essence of all systems has been the utopian pictures they paint in ideal situations..

And reality has always been a soured dream..

Each time the equation is between power and ideals… and power seems to tilt the scale…

So in each system there is assumed set of human rights, if adhered to in ideal terms which should provide the satisfactory results.

What sours the issue is power in the hands of few or some majority, which forgets all about these things in their frenzy of controlling the power…

But just think of it from a different point of view….

Who rules this universe?…

Do we have something like Human rights … in this context?

If the concept of One God is correct then we are not ruled by any democracy..

We are ruled by a power that is seemingly fair in its act and swift in its judgement..

Isn’t that a suitable form of governance?

Just a thought….!!

That is what millions do every few years…

Choose their gods to lord over them … and discover how lords never come close to gods..

3 Nations

An Indian Dream that was ....

One nation demanding its freedom from the other

and it got that at the cost of its body and soul being carved out ..

A 2 nation theory....

that has resulted in 3 nations so far..

I think English stayed true till the end to their leitmotif ruling policy .. divide and rule

they couldn’t rule anymore but divide they did....

now living in the third nation of this soured dream...

and watching 2 nations play out their games of friendship backhome..

heart is somehow filled with the pain of the stories from past....

pain which we(my people) were spared by virtue of geography... and demographics ...

call it divine timing ...I am reading a book called Husband Of A Fanatic

which is delving deep into these wounds

today when 2 nations owe their existence to the final British atrocity

and other nation convulses with the recurrent spasms of history every now and then...

one wonders ... if Mr. Jinnah is pleased and maybe those Englishmen too,

did they really get what they wanted ?

or did the millions pay with their lives for a horrible, political miscalculation

Amitava Kumar makes a very important point in this book...

he highlights as to how people belong to their homes, their villages...

and not super structure of nations as such...

and specially something that uproots them like nursery plants and replants them somewhere else

Was it more important to be a Pakistani?

Was it more important than being a Muslim as they were?

More so was it more important than being a human being?

We have played the enemies for so long... for political gains of a few ..

now we are playing friends all over again... again for political gains of a few

we are all acting out parts...believing our roles will last long in this act..

we dont know when curtain will come down....

we may never know the next act....