The game of democracy as played by successive governments of the world’s largest in its category, purely judged by its headcount far in excess of any other country enjoying the privilege of adult franchise to elect people’s representatives as members of Legislative bodies to frame policies and implement them through action by the Executive wing, seems to be characterised by the game’s ground rule, namely pinch and please. One is prompted to cite the idiom Rob Peter to Pay Paul and modify the same as ‘Unclothe Peter to Clothe Paul’ both of which have stood the test of time for centuries. English journalist, short-story writer, poet and novelist Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) adapted the metaphor appropriately to read “Robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul.” In the context of the present demographic scenario, granting many  privileges to some well-marked sections in the population and restricted opportunities to some other sections, based on their faiths, castes, creeds and other angles, on the authority of the nation’s Constitution, guessing which are these two sections is no big deal.

The priestly fraternity and scholarly speakers addressing their captive audiences recite on auspicious occasions the verse drawn from the Upanishads Sarve janaah sukhino bhavanthu. The intent, marked by magnanimity, seems to have made no discrimination between different sections of society until Sanskrit, the language of the verse, learnt by only one section of the then society did the damage of division on caste lines.

Having continued, unwittingly though, the divide and rule strategy of the colonial regime of nearly two centuries in the country and finally partitioning the sub-continent itself into two warring entities, successive governments post independence from the word go are disdainfully playing the game of pleasing two marked sections of the country’s population and pinching certain other sections, also well-marked, many among whom are moving out to other parts of the world in search of greener pastures, despite being regarded as second class citizens of their second homelands.

While the contentious issue of ensuring opportunities for education and jobs to certain sections of the country’s diaspora has its perceived historical developments and the clock cannot be put back, it is overdue to turn our attention to more important issues on the lines of the above quoted line from the Upanishad. Or else, the nation’s people shall be identified as 1.3 billion individuals and not as one nation’s citizens devoid of hatred towards one another.