While recent news reports of Japanese people dying from overwork is doing the rounds, in India we would not be surprised to hear people beginning to die from over celebration.
11 Oct, 2016, 05:40AM IST
We have survived a rather harrowing spell of one religious festivity while an even more terrifying bout of festivities have been lined up for the next couple of months. Instead of worship, religious festivities are degenerating into noise. The worship of Gods now provides an innocent facade for rowdyism, lynching and blasting. Noise seems to be the emerging religion of the masses. As the insanity of religious assertion progresses, the Right to Public Nuisance seems to be increasingly presumed to be a fundamental right. At times one gets the impression that there is an undeclared suspension of the Constitution itself by the law-keepers to facilitate public nuisance.
In certain States it is now increasingly believed that displaying a portrait of Pradhan Sevak Modi at the site of any illegal activity keeps the law enforcing authority at bay. Anyone who dares question the nuisance caused by religious festivities and other cultural celebrations is hounded as an anti-national and could even probably be accused of conspiring against Bharat. While crocodile tears are shed for the plight of the Mother Cow, the animal lovers and vegetarians have no problem with pounding Mother Earth using huge stacks of explosives from China to celebrate the arrival or departure of some God or observe the anniversary of some living demi-god politician. The Right to Celebrate is now being construed as a blanket license for creating public nuisance.
The public nuisance does not remain confined only to religious or cultural festivities. The Government administration too seems to presume that causing nuisance and inconvenience to public is their constitutional right. Threatening the life and limb of the citizen by neglecting worn-out roads, which are often absolutely unfit for motor vehicles particularly the two-wheelers, has become a ritual for the government machinery. The public is expected to silently and patriotically tolerate and cooperate with the nuisance resulting from gross dereliction of duties by governments which in turn dump the blame on nature’s fury. In fact, quite contrary to the ground reality, it is the public which is ultimately held responsible for road fatalities and prescribed with road safety gear by both the Government and civil society accomplices in crime. Just as politicians and social workers get a thrill from prescribing condoms to check the spread of HIV, so too is the excitement with distributing helmets to protect the brains of citizens irrespective of whether the other limbs remain functional or not after an accident.
Nowadays causing nuisance to public is also development. Whether it is the cutting of roads for laying optic fiber cables for IT, the promotion of tourism, or the hosting of international summits, the Government’s programs have in fact become nothing but a festival of nuisance. The then CM of Goa, once curtly responded to my e-mail complaining about the repeated traffic chaos and huge traffic jams every weekend in Panjim due to the huge influx of tourists into the State by asking me to recommend solutions to the problem. When ‘We the Public’ is never consulted before inviting hordes of tourists into the State which results in untold nuisance to the local citizens, with what moral authority does the Government ask people to give solutions? In other words, the government considers it a fundamental right to manufacture nuisance and believes that it is the fundamental duty of the citizen to either bear with the nuisance or give the solutions. Let us not forget that promoting nuisance is in itself an industry for politicians as is the experience with garbage treatment in the state.
The right to public nuisance cuts across the spectrum of economic development in the State. The builders have assumed that it is their fundamental right to build irrespective of the nuisance caused to anyone. For those whose livelihood depends on tourism, it seems to be presumed that their right to create nuisance to others around is included in the Right to Life. So was it with the mining lobby until a thunder bolt struck them from nowhere. Any citizen who dares demand the right to sleep, clean air, protection of culture, just transport fares, right to common resource and the rest is quickly denounced as being ‘anti-development’. The thrash generated from the mega party of the builders and hoteliers is expected to be cleared by the Gram Sabha of the village which is non-existent when any master plan is being drawn up. So just as in case of the road accidents it is the two-wheeler rider who gets blamed, in the case of garbage it is the public or the Village Panchayat that is held responsible for the mess but not the government or the industrialist who actually design and execute the master plans which generate nothing but nuisance.
(The author is a Social activist who has been a member of the Panchayat.)
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