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Here’s your opinion – learn it by heart

3 mars 2016, 10:25

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There is an antipodal difference between democracies and pseudo democracies, no matter how much demagogy or spin you put on it. In a real democracy, people are called upon to give their consent to legislative or policy changes which were not on the party’s manifesto when the latter ran for election. In a pseudo democracy, the only time people are consulted is when they are called upon to give their vote. In other words, every five years or so, they are allowed to choose their dictators and, between two polls, these take away all their rights and start taking big decisions for them.

You have followed the events in Switzerland this week, where almost three million Swiss used the ballot box to reject the proposal put forward by the right-wing Swiss People's Party to automatically expel foreigners who commit minor crimes. Some 59% of voters have said "No" to a law which would create a two-tier justice system unfairly targeting foreigners.

Contrast that with the gob-smacking interview in l’express of MSM MP Sudesh Raghoobur who gave us our opinion as a nation about a much more serious matter pertaining to the running of this country. Without blinking, he announced, “Pravind Jugnauth is an exceptional leader; the country needs him”. When asked whether that is a unanimous opinion, his answer was astounding: “Yes, of course, not only within the party but in the whole country!” Stupid Swiss, wasting their resources on insignificant issues by asking people about their opinion! When you want the people’s opinion, you give it to them!

This tendency to turn the spigots on uninhibited freedom of thought and unrestrained freedom of expression is becoming quite alarming. Sometimes it worryingly goes well beyond just giving people their opinions and extends to imputing motives to whoever dares to express a different point of view. You will have noticed that everyone who might have mistakenly assumed that the freedom of thought and expression enshrined in our constitution was an inalienable right and therefore felt free to express the contrarian opinion that the Heritage City project is not a priority, that its financing is opaque and that it will commit our children to paying a loan they cannot afford to take, was taxed as “anti-patriotic”, “with vested interests” and “against development”! 

Those on the other hand, who have spoken in favour of the project are held to have absolutely no vested interests, are highly patriotic and are forward-looking! They form a long queue of two: The appointed architect,Saeed Ahmed Saeed, who stands to earn fat fees once the project goes ahead and BDO – the firm commissioned with the feasibility study of the project and which, you may recall, has received death threats for having so far failed to deliver on promises on other projects. I mean people who have absolutely no vested interests in the project and who are – as we have always known – motivated solely by patriotism, the interests of the country and their wish to see development. They stand nothing to gain from the project, do they?

Development is, unfortunately, not measured by the number of tower cranes erected in a country. It is reflected in the unfettered freedom of citizens to express their views without fear of intimidation, harassment or victimisation. Until and unless government members like Raghoobur and Bhadain stop their totally misplaced arrogance of expressing our opinion for us, we will be stuck in the quagmire of human underdevelopment, no matter how many skyscrapers we manage to build with opaque finance.

One need not look to history to find tyrannical leaders. Today’s tyrants do not leave trails of blood. They merely stifle freedom of expression, shamelessly promote themselves and their cronies, destroy all opposition and eliminate checks and balances. They have nothing to envy Kim Jong-Il, Mobutu Sese Seko or even Mao Tse-tung. And there are plenty of such autocrats around in pseudo democracies.

 

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