Why left-liberals are so anti-poor
Being in a wheelchair I cannot move much, but within my confined reach I asked 5 people whom they were going to vote for.
Two of our maids, a guard who sits in the building lobby, an electrician who works in the building lobby and a retired government servant.
One maid is from U.P. She’s constantly excited about how her relatives back in her village have gotten gas cylinders and how some have built pucca houses with the money that they got from the government. Her own area now has clean and well-laid out roads. Electricity has reached her colony and she’s excited about it reaching her home soon. She voted for the BJP.
The other maid is from West Bengal. She can’t communicate in Hindi much but over the years we have begun to understand each other. She says Mamata Banerjee is a complete goon. People are randomly picked up, beaten up and killed. One has to pay money even to keep one’s own house from being occupied by one of her linchpins. She says her family supports the BJP but they have to be secretive about it.
The electrician is from Madhya Pradesh. He and his family voted for the BJP due to the work the BJP government has done in Madhya Pradesh. He says things have gone for the worse ever since the new Congress government came to power. Suddenly criminals have become active. Long-forgotten power cuts are back now. Infrastructure has begun to deteriorate just in a matter of a few months as if a curse has fallen upon the state.
When I asked him why people voted out the BJP government, he said, “Mati mari gayi thi. Pandra saal mein bhool gaye the ke Congress kaisi hai.” — People lost their minds. In fifteen years, people had forgotten how terrible the Congress is.
The retired government servant voted for the BJP. He said, “Kaam ho raha hai. Sab jagah dikhta hai.” — Work is happening. You can see it everywhere.
The guard isn’t given to much talking. He simply said, “Chutiya hi hoga jo BJP ko vote na dega.” — Only a moron wouldn’t vote for the BJP.
Why am I giving you these examples? None of the above ever mentioned anything about Muslims or a need to stand for Hinduism or they’re voting for the BJP because they think as Hindus they must vote for the BJP. They’re not even worried about Pakistan.
They support the BJP because they’re benefiting. For the first time they feel a government is actually working for them. For the first time they feel the poor are less poor and suddenly, there is a system that is there to support them rather than suppress them.
Now contrast this with the general feedback that you get from the left-liberal intelligentsia. If you read opinion pieces in The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, The Hindu, Huffington Post, Washington Post, New York Times and Guardian (just to name a few) you’ll get a sinking feeling that the country has gone to the dogs and there is gloom all around.
The current 2019 election results are being interpreted as vast swathes of people being emotionally exploited in the wake of the Pulwama carnage and the subsequent strike at Balakot.
Their primary concern is for the Muslims, or at least that’s what they want to drill into your psyche.
If you believe them, Muslims are being chased on the streets of different towns and cities. They are being threatened. They are being lynched with impunity. They are being evicted from their properties. The government is planning to oust then and send them to either Pakistan or Bangladesh. They are constantly treated as second class citizens.
India, under a “highly divisive” and “polarizing” Modi, is all set to become a Hindu Rashtra (an aggressively Hindu majoritarian nation), especially considering the sort of resounding victory the electorate has given him in the 2019 elections.
It’s an apocalypse sort of situation for them. Netflix is releasing dystopian movies and series one after another in which the writ of Hindutva forces run large and Muslims live in India as Jews lived in the pre-Holocaust days, or even worse. Leila by Deepa Mehta is one of many examples:
Another example is Ghoul.
For left-liberals, Narendra Modi and the BJP are all about Hindu nationalism and Hindu pride, and everything is secondary.
Again, if you don’t actively seek out alternative opinions, you may end up believing that the situation is actually grim in the country and there is nothing to look forward to. You are either an angry and hostile Hindu, or a progressive Hindu ashamed of those who root for Modi, or a nervous and scared Muslim. Nothing in between.
But, if you seek out alternative opinions, you will find that most of the instances being described by the left-liberal commentators have been either debunked as plain propaganda (fake news) or distortions of some other events.
Take for instance the lynching of Akhlaq. All over the world the news has spread that Akhlaq was lynched by an angry mob for eating beef. Later on, many media reports began to appear that hinted at it all being a conspiracy, even involving personal enmity. For example,
and this
The point is not to debunk what happened and what didn’t happen, the point is, how certain stories are cherry picked to prove that India is plunging into a communal darkness due to the BJP government.
If there are multiple versions of the story, why aren’t all versions covered, and only one version that paints India as a melting pot of aggressive Hindu ideology and anti-Muslim rage?
If there are attacks on Muslims by Hindus, there are also attacks on Hindus by Muslims.
Read this complete thread how Hindus are attacked by Muslims regularly.
Why aren’t such attacks covered with similar explicitness? India is a densely populated country of more than 133 crore people with a hostile history of more than a millennia between Hindus and Muslims. Some such incidents, no matter how undesirable, are bound to happen from both the sides.
Is it really a concern for the Muslims, or something else is going on?
If you closely observe the left-liberal discourse, you’ll notice they never seem to have problems with political parties, entities and organizations that perpetuate the state of chaos and lawlessness and as a result of these, poverty.
Most of the left-liberals are educated, so you can safely assume that they’re not totally dense. They must understand that to free people from poverty, there needs to be a sense of civilization, a sense of law and order. Without a sense of civilization, there can be no poverty alleviation.
How much sense of civilization have political outfits like SP, BSP, RJD, TMC and a hodgepodge of southern parties been able to maintain within their domains?
Someone from Bihar once told me that when Lalu’s mafia was in power, in villages and towns it was not possible to go out after 4 in the evening without a gun. How many articles and opinion pieces do you find in the above-listed publications on how Lalu had turned Bihar into a jungle-raaj?
Can industry thrive in such an environment? Can people have employment opportunities when people who can generate employment are routinely abducted for ransom and then that ransom is shared among the ruling political class. Logic?
When Mayawati was the CM no business could be setup without giving crores of rupees as bribe to her. By the way, did you see her palatial house on social media recently?
Find a single article on her corrupt ways in the “liberal” publications.
The less said about Mulayam-Akhilesh, the better it is. All the industries fled from U.P. during their reign.
Whereas you can find thousands of articles on how Narendra Modi looked the other way while “thousands of Muslims” were killed (around 790, actually) in Gujarat in 2002, can you find any single investigative article or editorials on why the country was more violent under the Congress rule? Hardly. Take for example these figures taken from Business Standard
The worst riots have happened under the Congress rule.
Has someone been incessantly asking the Congress and its motley spin-offs why after almost seven decades there are so many poor in the country? Rarely.
One common attribute among all the political entities supported by the left-liberals is that these political entities have kept the poor, poor. Just imagine, they couldn’t even start a campaign to encourage people to build bloody toilets during the past 6 decades.
You can easily observe that left-liberals find only those political outfits favorable that do least amount of work towards alleviating poverty.
Sometimes they say that even if the BJP does good work, the violence that happens under its nose, often allegedly encouraged by its leaders, nullifies every benefit. “If survival of the minorities is in danger, what’s the use of development?”
The problem with this line of thought is that the statistics tell another story. There is more violence under non-BJP, especially Congress governments, and less or no development.
On the other hand, there is less violence under the BJP, and more development. In just two years, UP has been completely transformed. Under the BJP government, Madhya Pradesh came out of the Bimaru states category.
So, why does it happen? Why are the left-liberals so anti-poor and pro-poverty?
Image credit Livemint
There are many reasons. There are political reasons, ecosystem-related reasons, ideological reasons, and simple stupidity due to herd mentality.
They may not directly be pro-poverty, but the causes they champion for, and the politico-ideological stands they take ultimately make them stand with forces that perpetuate poverty. Ask any left-liberal why they do so, why they stand with political parties, ideologies and organizations who keep people poor, he or she very haughtily tells you that it’s worth the cost if you want to save pluralism and secularism. Further, they say, if people are being killed in the name of religion and caste, what’s the use of prosperity?
Living in their comfortable homes and air-conditioned offices, with a single stroke they decide for millions of people how their lives should be.
India is a big country. The only way you can control people is through their minds. You can’t use force simply because logistically it’s not possible. Even during the Emergency, if they had wanted, people could have chased Indira Gandhi on the street and ended her reign of terror in a day. We are too many. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757 Lord Clive noted that when his army entered the city there were so many people standing by the sides of the path that they could have killed his army just with stones and sticks, but the desire was simply not there.
The political class that wants to loot the country non-stop knows this. It also knows that if they want to loot the wealth, the wealth needs to be created. So, this political class needs to maintain a very delicate balance of a population that generates enough wealth, but also exists in intellectual doldrums. Enough prosperity to keep them going, but not enough to give them enough mental space to question what the heck is going on.
This is achieved through the left-liberal ecosystem.
The job of the ecosystem is to keep different sections of the society on the edge, and at the same time, make sure the situation doesn’t go out of hand.
Hence, there is a class that makes enough money to continuously fuel the engine of corruption, and then there is the other class that maintains either political dictatorship or political instability through their franchise, due to their number.
The job of the left-liberal ecosystem is to continuously sow the seeds of discontent among various communities so the communities are always busy fighting each other instead of questioning the political class that pretends to represent their interests.
They use media and art to achieve this. Subtle or direct narratives are inserted to broadcast ideological theories (the Netflix examples given above).
The left-controlled academia uses course books to brainwash the young. Journalists use their propaganda expertise to spread fake news or twist facts.
The idea is to make you feel wretched about yourself, but not enough to depress you so much that you either stop making money for their preferred political class or turn into a maniac.
The political class needs left-liberals to keep the public intellectually confused. The left-liberals need the compromised political class that nurtures them, feeds them, and helps them sustain and grow their ecosystem. It’s a self-serving thing. Nothing personal.
The poor become collateral damage. Even if the left-liberals don’t outright hate the poor, a nationalistic government that works to reduce poverty poses an existential threat.
Why do they particularly hate the BJP?
The BJP wouldn’t have been a threat had it been any other party just there to loot the country. Being a nationalist party improving the lot of the people of Bharat is at the core of its political philosophy.
Why didn’t Swachch Bharat occur to any other political party? Couldn’t they see that compared to other countries how dirty India was?
Why did no other party feel outrage that millions of people defecated in the open? CPM could have launched a similar campaign. Gandhians within the Congress could have kickstarted something similar. It’s been a permanent fixture of the Indian landscape. One of the first things foreigners witnessed when they came to India. Why didn’t it become a national shame issue?
These are just two examples .
Poverty and wretchedness have been systematically maintained. They’ve been internalized to such an extent that our left-liberal class doesn’t even question why Amethi is so under developed despite being represented by the Congress crown prince himself? They could have turned the place into a model constituency just to prove a point. But no. It doesn’t even cross their minds that the poor deserve quality of life.
It’s because for the left-liberal class, for the general population of the country, poverty and wretchedness are natural states of being. In fact, they are taken aback when you talk about 24-hour power supply, hospitals, roads and schools in the rural areas, as if these things just don’t matter. For them, quality of life, as a concept, for the poor, is a totally alien concept.
There’s is this video that went viral on social media. A journalist from the left-liberal class was interviewing people in Varanasi, before the general elections. A resident told him, “There are new highways. The roads are excellent. Crime rate has gone down. There are no power cuts. Ganga has become clear. The railway stations are clean and well maintained.”
“All this is fine,” the journalist retorted. “But where’s the development?”
