Dissent makes for a healthy democracy, no matter what day of the week it is. People are far more likely to be happy if we have ministers who address problems.
Manohar Lal Khattar really wants us to be happy.
The Haryana chief minister was upset about the fact that India ranked 133rd among 156 nations in the World Happiness Report. So much so that he’s come up with a solution to the problem: If you want to be happy, just stop complaining about your issues, and maybe they’ll go away. Speaking in Kurukshetra, he advised the youth to observe Sunday as a ‘no-criticism day’.
“Sunday, in a true sense, is a ‘FUN’ day – F stands for forgiveness, U for untying oneself and N for no-criticism at least one day in a week,” he said, mirroring the love for acronyms that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Vice President Venkaiah Naidu have.
If Khattar has the time to come up with a contrived reverse acronym for the word fun, then it is safe to assume he thought his speech through before delivering it.
There seems to be a general trend, perhaps born from arrogant complacency, that if you’re a BJP minister in power, you can pretty much get away with saying whatever you want. Tripura CM Biplab Deb’s comments on the internet, Aishwarya Rai, and paan shops may make for amusing news-bytes that fade from our memory jut as fast as it took for the thought to form in the first place, but they reveal something rather disappointing about our elected representatives: That they don’t respect our time enough to do their research, or worry about the ramifications of their statements.
Khattar’s Haryana paints a grim picture
I remember watching confusion and resignation play across the contours of my friend’s face when she told me that her teacher had advised her not to speak out against the sexual harassment she was facing because “the system is rigged against you anyway”, and “his family is powerful, you’ll spend years fighting for justice that you’ll never get”. Censorship often wears the cloak of a consoling hand, walking you towards a willful silence that is always ‘in your best interest.’
Advice, in that sense, is never binding contractually, but the fact is that we live in a world of inequity and imbalance, where what is true, and what is right, is determined by those in power – our teachers, parents, CEOs, and our ministers.
Perhaps Khattar wants the people of Haryana to stop complaining one day of the week because there’s just so much to still complain about in his own state. If you can’t fix the problem, just advise others to stop seeing it as one. Based on available data, 191 gang rapes took place in the state in 2016 with a rate of 1.5 per cent against the national average of 0.3 per cent. Haryana saw a 54 per cent rise in farmer suicides from 2015 to 2016, and ranked 9th in the country when it came to juvenile crimes. As of 2017, 71.1 per cent children had anaemia while 62.7 per cent women and girls (age 15-49) were anaemic in Haryana. Further, 45 per cent children in Haryana were also suffering from malnutrition.
To pretend that happiness is a mindset in a deeply deprived country is a convenient passing of blame. It’s like trying to fight depression with a Hallmark card. Dissent makes for a healthy democracy, no matter what day of the week it is, and as a fellow resident of Haryana, I promise people are far more likely to be happy if we have ministers who address the real root of the problem.
“What is surprising is that despite being one of the fastest growing economies of the world and having a life expectancy of over 70 years, we are among the 25 unhappiest countries on the planet,” Khattar said.
The Haryana CM also said, “The freedom that people have here is like nowhere else in the world. Challenge before us is to address the issue of happiness directly and not as collateral to economic abundance.”
Despite my non-existent experience in governing a state, if there’s one thing I can say with certainty it’s that Khattar really needs to figure out what he’s trying to say — for the sake of the people who elected him. Biplab Deb should also be invited to the workshop.