#113 Armchair thunder
Beware the armchair experts, the politicians most of all!
In a 1975 unpublished autobiographical manuscript, Nelson Mandela wrote: “Only armchair politicians are immune from committing mistakes. Errors are inherent in political action. Those who are in the center of political struggle, who have to deal with practical and pressing problems, are afforded little time for reflection and no precedents to guide them and are bound to slip up many times.”
An armchair politician has strong opinions that he stoutly defends, often without basis or research. Look around, and they are everywhere, especially on TV shows and social media. A small detail such as being ill informed, does not stop them from airing opinions with smug entitlement. Echoing a line from Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara: “He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.”
They are not difficult to identify; for even as they put their wisdom on show, armchair politicians generally lack any worthwhile in-depth social service experience, genuine credentials or a record of active community involvement. Without offering or doing anything useful, their lingua franca is criticism — of their predecessors or of anyone trying to accomplish anything. That of course is because they always know better and can give you many reasons why any plan is bound to fail.
Inexhaustible fountains of political jargon, Indian armchair politicians are given to misquoting Gandhiji regardless of context. This breed does little to follow through with actions to back up opinions, preferring instead to pontificate from the comfort of well upholstered armchairs. These political pundits who thunder from their living rooms are in sharp contrast to grassroots politicians, a breed that is sadly going extinct.
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While armchair politicians can be found everywhere, in India the highest density of them is undoubtedly in Delhi. That obviously is because it is the political capital, everyone knows one or the other politician, and the number of activists per square foot is impressively high. Delhi is home to the largest contingent of bureaucrats in the country, who become more loquacious as they get closer to retirement.
Delhi is also the chosen home of politically opinionated “intellectuals” — journalists, academics and writers — who of course are the ones with the highest per capita expertise on any subject. Activisms of all kinds — media, civil society, political — flourish in Delhi. All in all, a delectable potpourri for armchair politics.
The sad side of politics is that politicians who roam the lanes and bylanes of the hinterlands and the cities to garner votes, become inaccessible once elected. They remove themselves from grimy reality. Ensconced in high security fortresses, they know little of what is happening with and to the people who elected them. The transition from lowly lanes to plush armchair is quickly and easily made.
When elections approach the wily politician is back on the road, trudging door to door, hugging babies, touching the feet of “maa-jis” to seek their blessings (!), a reassuring arm around the shoulders of common folk to say he still is one of them and yet again reviving the hope of a brighter tomorrow waiting in the wings.
Ironic but true that armchair politicians are largely a creation of television and social media. Politicians today are articulate, well groomed, publicity savvy media personalities. Like any veteran talk show host on TV, they strut around, sprinkle catchy sound bites and play to the gallery. And they never lose sight of TRPs! They are helped along by guileless, unthinking voters willing to be led by hearsay than actual knowledge. Busy working hard to keep body and soul together, the common man has little time to research a politician or assess his track record of delivering on poll promises.
There of course was a time when the doer was prized, not the talker. In his speech “Citizenship in a Republic”, delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, on 23 April, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt, the youngest ever President of the United States spoke thus:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
