The Pakistanis, over the past year, have braved bullets, assassinations and dictatorial persecution to throw out a general and give themselves at least half a democracy. Whatever happens on Pakistan’s western flank and in its fundamentalist underbelly, the basic instinct of its elites, intellectual and social, its media and professional classes is to seek to strengthen their very fragile democracy, and to seek more of it. God knows, they have reasons to hate their politicians. But they have also checked out the generals for four decades and, wiser for that experience, have no intention of returning to their embrace. And exactly at the same time, the same classes in India have turned themselves into a lynch mob against the political class and, by implication, the whole democracy. The one institution the Pakistani elites are suspicious of is their military. The one institution Indian elites respect and adore today is their military. You’d wonder just what is going on.

Since TV chat shows, SMS and chain emails have become the main forum of our domestic debate and political discourse among the upper crust, it is safe to go by the evidence of what you see and read there. Any number of illiterate emails and SMSes now float around, not merely cursing politicians, but spreading utter falsehoods about the Constitution and laws. There is one, for example, that says that our Constitution (article 49-O, it specifically says) entitles us to go to a polling booth and say we do not want to vote for anyone, and if the number of such votes is higher than votes polled by the leading candidate, the election will be set aside and nobody will be elected. So that is the way to fix the political class which, realising that, has kept that article under wraps. Now most of us passed our class X Civics a long time ago, and God alone knows how, so let’s not question anybody’s knowledge of our Constitution. But none of the thousands of very well-educated, rich, successful, respectable people through whom this silly mail has passed and been forwarded, have bothered to check that venerable document. For, if they did, at least one myth would have been set at rest: Article 49 deals with something very important, but it is not the right of negative vote, but the protection of our monuments. Similar, stupid, flippant and dangerous mythologies continue to be built: that we spend more on the SPG than on the NSG, the implication being that we value the lives of our prime minister and president more than those of ordinary citizens. Nobody checked the facts, probably because if they turn out different, they may demolish the entire hypothesis. Why let facts come in the way of holy indignation?

... contd.