By Robert Clements
The Great Election Religion Tamasha…!
“Who are you voting for?” he asked me with great seriousness, as though the future of the nation rested delicately between his teacup and my answer.
“I was thinking,” I said, “of voting for whoever will stop the unnecessary concretising down my road.”
He looked at me with pity. Not anger. Not disagreement. Just pity. As though I had completely misunderstood democracy and reduced it to potholes and pavements.
Because, you see, we no longer vote for roads, water, education, or hospitals. Those are minor inconveniences that we have learnt to live with. They are treated like background noise in a crowded market. The real question, the one that now towers above everything else, is far simpler and far more dangerous.
“What is your religion?” And thus begins the Great Election Religion Tamasha. The drums begin first. Not real drums, but the constant beat of speeches, slogans, and forwarded messages that arrive on our phones with the urgency of breaking news and the accuracy of fiction. Leaders take the stage and speak with great passion. Not about how many schools they will build or how many jobs they will create, but about how many enemies they will identify and how many fears they will awaken.
And we, the audience, sit there, utterly captivated. We clap. We cheer. We forward. We argue. We feel involved. We feel important. We feel as though we are part of something historic. A great battle. A noble cause. A defence of identity.
Meanwhile, the script is already written.
Because when the curtain finally falls, something astonishing happens. Nothing changes where it actually matters.
The poor remain poor. The rich grow richer.
And a brand new group of politicians quietly joins the billionaire club. It is almost magical in its consistency.
The same man who arrived at your doorstep before the elections, folding his hands, touching your feet, speaking of sacrifice and service, now moves past you in a convoy of cars that could buy half your neighbourhood. His security personnel push you aside as though you are an inconvenience. His children study abroad. His declared assets rise like a well watered plant. But his speech remains unchanged.“Your religion is under threat.”
And we nod.
We nod because outrage is easier than responsibility. It is far more comfortable to feel angry about something abstract than to ask questions about something real. Nobody wants to ask what happened to promises made five years ago. Nobody wants to ask why their area still floods after one hour of rain. Nobody wants to ask how a man who claimed to serve the people now lives like royalty.
Those are difficult questions.
Dangerous questions.
Questions that require thought.
Religion, on the other hand, requires only emotion. And emotion is the most profitable currency in any election. So we spend it freely.
We argue at dining tables. We lose friendships. We avoid relatives. We divide ourselves neatly into camps and then defend those camps with a passion we never show for our own living conditions. We become warriors in a battle that benefits everyone except us.
And while we are busy fighting each other, something else is happening quietly in the background.
Contracts are being signed. Deals are being negotiated. Land is being allocated. Money is moving. Fortunes are being built.
But we do not see any of this because our eyes are fixed firmly on the stage where the Tamasha is in full swing.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if, just once, we changed the script. What if the next time someone asked us, “Who are you voting for?” We replied calmly, “The one who can show me results.”
Imagine the confusion. “What results?” They would ask, genuinely puzzled.
“Water that comes when the tap is opened. Roads that last longer than a monsoon. Schools where teachers actually teach. Hospitals where patients are treated with dignity. Jobs that allow people to live, not merely survive.”
Imagine the silence that would follow.
Because the moment we shift the conversation from religion to results, the entire Tamasha begins to crumble. The noise dies down. The slogans lose their power. The speeches sound hollow. The leaders, who have perfected the art of dividing us, suddenly find themselves facing a united audience asking a single, inconvenient question.
“What have you done?”
And that is a question very few are prepared to answer. But until that day arrives, the show will go on.
The banners will grow bigger. The speeches louder. The divisions deeper. We will continue to vote not as citizens seeking progress, but as followers defending identity. We will continue to celebrate victories that change nothing and mourn defeats that do not affect our daily lives. Every five years, we watch the same story unfold with new actors, new slogans, and the same ending.
The poor remain poor. The rich grow richer.
And somewhere, behind the noise and the colour and the carefully staged outrage, another group quietly counts its winnings.
The Tamasha continues.
And perhaps the most tragic part of it all is this. We are not just the audience. We are the reason the show exists…!
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