Mahadeep Singh Jamwa
A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy, educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership. Not everyone who occupies high office is a leader. A person who merely coordinates the actions of others or has management skills is not a leader. Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful. So here we must differentiate between a leader and a politician? A politician is interested in power and position, over promises to win the elections, creates chaos and ruckus, creates problems for his own gains, looks for his own performances, works selfishly and looks for the problem in all the opportunities. Whereas leaders under promise and over deliver, solve the problem through consensus, build friends based on shared visions, values and principles and committed to those values. We can say it’s unlikely to have a good politician and a great leader in one person just as it’s impossible to have a prostitute and a virgin in one girl. What qualities then a common man should look for in his representative? Which virtues are required to provide ethical representation? We can sum up some of the qualities such as: honesty and integrity, confidence, inspire others, commitment and passion, good decision making capabilities, accountability, delegation and empowerment, empathy, resilience, humility, transparency, vision and purpose. It is never possible that all natural born human beings should possess all qualities that a common man likes to see in his representative. The world history is blank regarding such personalities accepted by one and all without any commentary. We have arrived at a stage of a similar situation, where there is drought in fertility of real politicians in India. The recapitulated qualities expected in politicians, when put to the reality test with regard to the politicians of India irrespective of party affiliation right from 1947 till date, we come up with a dirty picture, painted by scams, corruption, favoritism, criminality, exploitations, dynastic rule, self promoting, lust for power, ignoring the balloters after being mandated to power, creating ditches between communities on caste and religion for vote bank, fake commitments and what not. The people with cases of rape, murder, dacoits, kidnapping, loot, corruption and what not are enjoying constitutional immunities and hovering over the citizens as ministers well protected by security categories on the tax payers money. The architects of the Constitution have shown much disregard to the law abiding society by stipulating no provision to debar those from contesting elections as well as inducting them in Government involved in criminal cases and as a result we have experienced such criminals making law for law abiding citizens from day one till date. A criminal overnight becomes an ‘Honorable’ subject. This is how our great Constitution mandates. We are bound to raise the finger against those responsible for our Constitution and those leaders to bring an amendment and neglect the most required provision of at least basic qualification for a politician, who as representative of people has to hand down thousands of important laws and policies to their communities and country. For an educated, neat and clean person who could prove to be a real representative of people’s aspirations, we are left with no solution except to look for scientific intervention for the invention of ‘Test Tube Politicians’ on the analogy of ‘Test Tube Baby’. We have advanced much in scientific inventions and are now blessed with a technique to get babies having genes of our choice. The scientific revolution has solved a number of problems faced by people from time to time. A Los Angeles clinic is offering the ultimate in designer babies. Want a son with brown eyes, black hair and a dark complexion or a pale-skinned, blonde, green-eyed daughter? One has the wonders created by scientist Robert Edwards (conferred Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for developing the IVF treatment) and gynecologist Patrick Steptoe in 1978, when the first test tube baby, Louise Brown was born in England.
Before downing the curtain, I would like to say that my intentions here are not to malign or degrade the representatives or someone but to point out the grey area where a much talked honest, intelligent, visionary, dynamic leader should pay attention for bringing reforms so that tainted and uneducated should not have escape channel to reach Parliament or Assemblies. We are also eagerly looking forward and our hopes are pinned upon the scientists to make available the techniques accessible in a very affordable manner in every medical college of the country to have real politicians in meaning by producing such stuff through available technology of test tube babies, segregating the genes of scams, corruption, favoritism, criminality, exploitations, dynastic rule, lust for power, creating ditches between communities on caste and religion for vote bank from the DNA of those aspiring to become community leader as politician and inseminating genes of required standard for an end production that will stand to the required standards of the politics on the analogy of the ‘Test Tube Baby’ in the form of ‘Test Tube Politician’ only then our future will be in safe hands. Luhan Yang, a Harvard recruit from Beijing; a young postdoctoral scientist is a key player in developing a powerful new technology for editing DNA. Harvard laboratory had a project under way to determine how it could be achieved. So why not design a highly intelligent group of people as ‘Test Tube Politicians’ on the analogy of ‘Test Tube Babies’ culture, who could be tomorrow’s leaders in real sense.