Ideologies at Play
Again, there has been an attack in the valley (Kashmir), this time in Uri, Jammu and Kashmir. Home Minister Mr. Rajnath Singh has asserted that ‘Pakistan should be called a terror state’, PM Modi has criticized the attack by stating that ‘attack will not go unpunished’. These remarks sketch a rightist approach.
During the UPA regime too the valley was perturbed, after one such terror attacks on the army and police camps on 26th September, 2013, PM Manmohan Singh then had condemned the attack and had stated that, ‘it was an attack on peace’ and the then external affairs minister Salman Khurshid had commented and stated then that ‘the roots of the event will have to be addressed and that will need some kind of engagement with our neighbor’. These observations indeed portray a centrist balanced approach.
Metaphorically, Kashmir can come up to be as any department or unit in an organization which is under invariable straining owing to the offensive caused by the trade unions, who try to rally the workers against the organization and its management. The organization is India, the top management is the government at the center, the workers are the Kashmiri’s and the trade unions are the militant groups and the separatists, with whom a steady communication becomes fundamental, to maintain the situation in the region.
As the decisions taken by the management would affect the department under duress adversely or otherwise and would thereby enliven the course of future operations, similarly the strategic level decisions taken by the central government would demarcate the responses of the valley, in the due course.
If the statements made by the respective governments former and latter are to be contemplated upon, the UPA stood a better chance to pummel a conciliatory note with the people of the valley as against their counterparts, who seem to adorn a more advancing demeanor.
Similarly, people in their lives come across others who take a rightist, leftist or a centrist approach. During the British period, in India there were the moderates or they were also known as propagators of center-left or moderate left politics and there were the extremists who were known to infuse right-wing extremism, with Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Lokmanya Tilak spearheading their respective factions.
The path chosen by the people leaning towards the centrist side is a middle ground which tends to be adequately balanced, contemporary but yet taking certain fundamental conventional principles also into reasoning. While those with the leftist ideology is more on the other side of the coin which is contemporary, liberal, free and has no glimpses of the typical methodologies whatsoever. And the right wingers showcase violent and aggressive stance, having a ready to kill mindset believing in do or die philosophies, who require to be tamed on certain occasions as wars and disputes cannot form answers to questions the world over.
Communicating with the rightist can be a major challenge as they result in being less and less articulate in emphasizing objective, stabilized views. On the farther side the leftist and the centrist lean towards being comprehensible and meaningful but the leftist can move on the road to sounding idealist or utopian which is closer to having an impractical rational.
It becomes easy to make a person with a leftist or centrist mindset see reason as these people tend to generalize situations. Hence, a dialogue is possible with them, compared to the right wingers who conceive events on the basis of their ideologies, typically representing an ‘I am always right’ kind of a composition.
The leftist and the centrist can be flexible in accepting creativity and contemporary representations while the rightist become the hard bingers who succumb to the mire of their age old meanderings and in the process suffocate others moreover with their vintage reasoning.
But as it is suitably mentioned ‘It takes all sorts to create this world’, therefore the leftist, rightist and the centrist all have their respective place on this planet, as a balance becomes pertinent for all to move ahead unanimously. Then can it be said they are all the two sides of the same coin?
Besides there are times when the rightist have to lay aside their standpoint to move ahead with the society, with the seeds of attack lurking at the back of their minds, ready to pounce upon at the first available opportune moment, they seem to simply be inundated with savage thoughts to strike which they subsequently do. While the leftists and the centrists prefer to remain within the shackles of their unheard views gracefully as they provide opportunities for the majority views to stay afloat while they enliven the picture of their own thoughts getting sunk.
To illustrate this point further, Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal along with BJP leader and NDMC member Ms Meenakshi Lekhi, agreed recently to rename the road where the PM lives. The Delhi CM and the NDMC leadership currently hail from diverse ideologies, the former being termed a leftist and the latter rightist. But for uniformity to prevail the leftist drifts away from his theories to maintain a practical ground.
The same could be said about the rightist to a certain extent, since during the September 2013 Jammu and Kashmir attacks, the rightist upheld the strategic level decisions related to Kashmir, taken by the then left-centrist UPA government at the center but with a tinge of their rightist flavor with the then BJP party president Rajnath Singh called for discontinuing talks with our neighbor in any form. Thus the rightist generally rally their contentious articles of faith and it takes a while for them to come to terms with modifications of any kind.
In the corporate sector these principles can be witnessed with the way the top management handles situations, either they manage issues adorning a ‘we are always right’ kind of a character, or would take a middle ground or would deal with the contention head on, asserting themselves and that would determine what philosophies they render.