{"id":2700,"date":"2016-04-16T06:58:37","date_gmt":"2016-04-16T01:28:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=2700"},"modified":"2016-04-16T06:58:37","modified_gmt":"2016-04-16T01:28:37","slug":"politics-career-liberals-youth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=2700","title":{"rendered":"Why All of Us Need to Start Considering Politics As a Career Option"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

M<\/span>ain ek din bada neta banuga na, dekh lena phir,\u201d warned a 12-year-old in my neighbourhood in his retort to a gang of fellow troublemakers during a fight. \u201cTu chor hai waise bhi,\u201d giggled his friends, as they teased him for being a bully. It got me thinking about how the general perception of a neta as corrupt, immoral, and bigoted is so familiar that even children associate dishonesty as an essential trait to become one.\n\nA politician, as usually depicted in our movies, is someone who abuses power for his vested interest, either for money or to spread communal hatred. The hapless citizen invariably becomes a victim of the system \u2013 \u00a0like the photographers Vinod and Sudhir in <\/p>Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro<\/em> \u2013 fighting for his basic rights. And to be fair, this perception of politicians has some basis in reality. Thirty six per cent<\/a> of our parliamentarians have criminal charges against them and this includes not just corruption but also murders and rape<\/a>. Many are ill-qualified to gauge the technicalities of the portfolio assigned to them: Smriti Irani was offered the HRD ministry in 2014, making her responsible for the country\u2019s education<\/a>. We all know how that went<\/a>.\n\n\u201cNathuram Godse deshbakht the, hai, aur rahenge,\u201d BJP\u2019s Pragya Singh Thakur said during the election campaign. Samajwadi Party strongman Azam Khan\u2019s \u201ckhakhi underwear remark\u201d has caused enough outrage. Rahul Gandhi\u2019s gibberish speeches have given us numerous facepalms. We have hopelessly protested as scandals worth crores have unravelled, yet we choose to come back and elect the same set of politicians every few years. How do we let so many criminals and tone-deaf men and women get elected to such powerful positions in the first place?\n\nAuthor and political analyst Milan Vaishnav in his book When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle In Indian Politics<\/em><\/a> looks at some of the possible reasons. He claims candidates with a criminal charge are likely to use caste-based politics to sweep the votes, like we have seen with the Lingayat vote<\/a> in Karnataka in the past. There\u2019s also the fact that our bureaucratic institutions are inefficient and we bribe<\/a> our way past this inefficiency. If you look around and see a garbage dump that hasn\u2019t been cleared for days or a manhole is left uncovered, you will care little. And if it\u2019s too much of a bother, you will call up whoever can pull off a jugaad at the BMC office. And this is where the problem lies. We have come to expect so little of our leaders, that at the time of elections we end up choosing \u201cthe lesser of the two evils\u201d with justifications like, \u201cWhat if they are casteist, at least they build roads?\u201d or \u201cWhat if they are corrupt, they at least do not spread communal hatred<\/a>?\u201d When we employ this \u201cat least\u201d argument, what we essentially do is turn a blind eye to the fact that there just aren\u2019t enough quality professionals entering politics or the bureaucracy, and we are complacent about it.\n\nWhich is surprising because you see we, the woke<\/a> and the liberal<\/a>, are socially aware and have an opinion on everything \u2013 be it sexual harassment<\/a> or the government\u2019s bigotry, the Congress party\u2019s failing fortunes or the future of our democracy. We are out on the streets protesting against the unlawful chopping of our forests or increasing crimes against women. All of this is great, necessary and effective at making our leaders more accountable no doubt, but it is also surprising that politics and bureaucracy do not feature as a career choice for most of us.\n

We are out on the streets protesting against the unlawful chopping of our forests or increasing crimes against women.<\/blockquote>\nThe BJP government has opened the doors of bureaucracy to \u201coutstanding individuals\u201d<\/a> from the private sector and multinationals who are keen to work toward nation-building. There were 10 vacancies in the revenue, financial services, economic affairs, commerce and civil aviation departments. But how many of us keyboard activists<\/a> ranting about GST and the rising fuel prices while sitting comfortably on our office bean bags will apply?\n\nJobs that are so important to us as a nation and which directly affect our lives, such as becoming a parliamentarian, are instead left to become the post-retirement options for actors and cricketers. At a time when we are experimenting with our careers more now than before, and there is no dearth of social entrepreneurs, why does our politically and socially conscious generation turn away from politics as a career option?\n\nThe reasons and excuses are aplenty: There are no reliable ways of making a foray into politics to the lack of commitment to public causes, but the key one being politics is not seen as a career option that our parents or the society approves of. It is something \u201cthe other kind\u201d of people who have no education, ambition, or who belong to powerful families do. A dangerous and dirty puddle that no one will willingly want to jump into, because as pilot Ajay Singh Rathore of Rang De Basanti<\/em> once commented, \u201cGhar ki safai mein haath ganda kaun kare.\u201d Our college campuses where student politicians are born, often get raided to intimidate those who like to question<\/a> and challenge the establishment. And if they don\u2019t get intimidated and back down, they lose the fire in their belly when the time to \u201csettle down\u201d comes calling. Politics becomes a \u201ccollege thing\u201d that you once dabbled in, like the hero of Sudhir Mishra\u2019s haunting Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi<\/em>.\n\nHow many of us are ready to stake our lives, jobs, and careers for the sake of a political ideology we believe in? Finding an existing political party that you \u00a0believe in, is the first big stumbling block you claim to face and yet in the peak phase of AAP, at a time when professionals were aligning with the political, and young blood was being infused into stodgy politics, how many of us ventured forth? The Aam Aadmi Party<\/a> started out with promise, offering a brand of politics the middle class could get behind \u2013 fresh, idealistic, and focussed on issues of public importance, like corruption or electricity. But years later, it seems, even this promise was not enough to get the younger generation involved.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We, the woke and the liberal, are politically and socially conscious, and have an opinion on everything \u2013 from the Congress\u2019s failing fortunes to the future of democracy. We are out on the streets, protesting against hate crime and the unlawful chopping of forests, but why does politics not feature as a career choice for most of us?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":2701,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[5464,4722,4267,3367,1196,33,803,5465,4168],"class_list":["post-2700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pov","tag-bigotry","tag-career","tag-finance","tag-government","tag-liberals","tag-politics","tag-sexual-harassment","tag-socially-conscious","tag-youth"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy All of Us Need to Start Considering Politics As a Career Option<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We, the woke and the liberal, are politically and socially conscious, and have an opinion on everything \u2013 from the Congress\u2019s failing fortunes to the future of democracy. 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We are out on the streets, protesting against hate crime and the unlawful chopping of forests, but why does politics not feature as a career choice for most of us?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=2700\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Arr\u00e9\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-04-16T01:28:37+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1528784173.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1520\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"850\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Kavya J\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Why All of Us Need to Start Considering Politics As a Career Option\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"We, the woke and the liberal, are politically and socially conscious, and have an opinion on everything \u2013 from the Congress\u2019s failing fortunes to the future of democracy. 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