Dear Editor,
The coalition government needs to be more aware, as well as more politically astute. Every action it takes (or does not take) will be weighed and measured and found wanting. It should, therefore, be sensitive to the optics of things, and act accordingly.
In a rabidly polarized society, it is counterintuitive and counterproductive for the new government to furnish opposition and unbelievers with swelling armouries to pick and choose instruments of confrontation, negation, and diminution. This is self-wounding to the government. Whether the national awards list or state boards composition, great care and discipline must be exercised to attain the meritorious and unchallengeable, as opposed to what is merely symbolic and indicative of hoary biases.
I think that the coalition has stumbled, but since the hour is early, there is room for remedial thinking and redeeming curative action going forward.
The old and previous has been castigated, quite rightly, for its calculatingly purposeful rhetorical assaults; the new must avoid, at all costs, those actions, concrete and admissible, that corroborate claims of an identical bent; this is the sting in the tail. This opens wide the door for endless parallel argumentation on the eternal race issue. It enables equalization of divisive behaviour. Put differently: the claim and counterclaim would be that one political group verbalizes matters sharply, and the other practises robustly the same through its own actions. Neither is constructive for this society, however disguised, however minimalized, however rationalized.
In one of my very first writings in the post-election result period, I shared a fervent, immovable belief. It is that, unless there is racial healing and racial reconciliation, then this land will continue to be a ramshackle collection of hostile peoples, rather than the longed for, dreamt of, one people. In other words, it would resemble the perpetual political squatting area that it has come to be, and not a cohesive nation. This is not subject to nuance or discussion; it is just plain common sense.
Now given recent constructs and actions, I feel that movement in an appealing direction is at a standstill at best. It rekindles the charged clamour from the lost decades about racial triumphalism, political hegemony, and social rupture, but now from another quarter. If there is to be progress, if there is to be hope, if things are to be different, then it is imperative that they be substantively different in ways recognizable and persuasive. If not, then this is travelling on a treadmill that is going no place, gathering no traction, and resulting in no progress.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall