Dear friends, Consent and dissent are the essential ingredients of democracy.

We usually give our consent to all acts of our elected or nominated, representatives for the purposes of policy formulation, rule making, rule application, rule adjudication and so on. This mass consent often gets reflected in the election results and sometimes in public opinion manifested through different means available in a democracy. In addition to that this consent provides the much required legitimacy which is the only way of converting the power into authority. Otherwise, the power may become ruthless, irresponsible, unaccountable and even undesirable. Therefore, the consent of the people to the actions of the authority is a must for the sustenance of every democracy. As a corollary, it may be argued that the authority has to act in such a way that its every act gets peoples sanction. At the same time, (the life of any democracy necessarily depends on the existence of dissent) democratic governance involves the acceptance of and tolerance to the dissenting voice in the forms of processions, agitations, movements, written or oral expressions and so on. The dissenting voice denotes the existence of certain amount of dissatisfaction with the policies and decisions of the authority and it is almost mandatory to have differing and divergent views so as the make the best use of the collective wisdom prevalent in any polity for the purpose of enhancing the functional capabilities and widen the gamut of acceptability. Dissenting points of view are, in a way, checks and balances for the authority. The powers, therefore, have to be exercised in such a way that dissent is not considered a threat to the system or authority but in a positive way, it must be treated as constructive criticism engaged in suggesting alternative ways of public policy formulation and exercise of executive authority besides providing inevitable criticism of the rule- makers. These simple but not easily digestible constructs of democratic governance are sometimes misunderstood by the people in authority as totally unacceptable and alien to the basic concept of democracy. The political developments of last two- three months have posed a number of questions before us in the perspective of aforesaid theorizations. It would never be easy to contextualize the events in the framework of democratic theory and value system. Yet the challenges that have emerged during these months require a lot of analysis. They also require an evaluation of the functioning of the authority alongwith close examination of the acts of all those people who are called the representatives of civil society. The statements from the people in authority have lacked coherence, continuity, responsibility, and smack of arrogance, perulance, vengeance, conceit and vanity. The

utterances of the other side (if there are any) are full of contradictions and exhibit, disrespect and disbelief in democratic institutions, besides self- righteousness. Both the extremes are unwarranted and dangerous. The pernicious nexus between the fourth estate and the socalled civil society has also given birth to a large number of questions that might be uncomfortable to both of them. The present crisis has created a sense of bewilderment amongst the masses about the extent and the amount of corruption prevalent at the higher places thereby resulting in mass public opinion apparently supportive of these stagemanaged shows of peoples agitation. The way the authority has responded to these agitations and their largely theoretical and meaningless demands, reveals the sense of insecurity in the powers that be. The insensitive, uncalled for, brutal and senseless midnight action on the sleeping males and females demands condemnation in strongest terms. The flurry in which the government of the day decided in extremely opposite ways in a few hours to deal with the agitation is still un-understandable and remains undemocratic. The way that the agitators of civil society have treated the legitimate government and its mediating representatives is also unimaginable and worrisome because it questions the fundamental power of the authority of rulemaking through elected representatives in a democratic system. The trajectory of events also demonstrates that we are still greatly attracted by catchy slogans and wishful thinking. The use of language, the choice of words, the strategy adopted, the threats given, the dangers exhibited and cries made by the ruling class, all were preposterous and undesirable. The adamant, rude, unrelenting and uncompromising attitude of the civil society towards any kind of suggestions not only from the authority but also from other similarly civil sections of the society was also unjust and unreasonable. The methodology with which our absolutely free and extremely unaccountable media dealt with the agitation and the attempt to make and unmake images of people and actors involved in the whole saga was also repetitive, lousy, distasteful, partisan and selective as usual. The academia continued to remain indifferent and largely dependent on the media reports and analysis (if there were really any) for making opinions yet restraining to express them in any fruitful or expressive way. The most unfortunate part of the whole development is that most of the players are discussing creation or modification of institutions or making or unmaking of rules and laws to fight the menace of corruption. And nobody, yes nobody, is speaking about us, the citizens as individuals. No body dares to say that corruption prevails because we actively take part in that. We accept it, we glorify it, we demand it,

we tolerate it, we encourage it and we facilitate it. Therefore, my take in this issue is that we have to endeavour to change the individual first. We have to transform the character of the individual. We have to inculcate moral values in the life of the individual. We have to create good human beings. Then only any institution will deliver, otherwise, the whole exercise will be unnecessary and unfruitful. The generation of good individuals will make every- body comfortable with consent and dissent as Kautilya invokes:-

thoUrq es k=qx.kk% lnSo ;s"kak izlknkr~ lqfop{k.kksge~A ;nk ;nk eke~ fod`frayHkUrs Rknk rnk eke~ izfrcks/k;fUrAA
11 June, 2011 Kumar Sharma) Meerut (Sanjeev