At a recent event in Gujarat, PM Modi said that it has now become a trend to ask the government to account for its work. His exact words were –
There is a recent trend of people expecting that everything has to be done by the government. They also seek answers from the government for the works that are not done. This was not a tradition in our country.
These statements by a head of state are positively jarring, mainly for their ignorance, but also for their irony.
Why in the world would a democratically elected government not be accountable to the people? It’s literally in the Constitution. It’s one of the basic tenets of democracy.
Let’s simplify it to the fundamentals. A democratically elected government is made up of public servants. If an employee hasn’t completed the job he/she was hired for, the boss is going to pull him or her up. It’s not hard to comprehend, that’s just a global fact.
But it’s not just the factual absurdity of his words that warrant ridicule. It’s also that he seems completely ignorant of his own questioning of the government when the Congress was in power.
He and his party consistently questioned Manmohan Singh and the rest on issues facing the country, and rightly so!
This isn’t a new trend. This isn’t even a trend. It’s a dynamic that has existed for decades, and it’s something that safeguards the public from authoritarian rule. And to casually dismiss it as something as annoying as a pointless trend undermines the very meaning of our freedom.
