Persecution Complex

I SPY

Whenever a person finds that he/she is losing battles in life, he/she will try to create a barrier all round him/her under the impression that such a measure reduces the person’s vulnerability. This manifests in different ways; isolating oneself from the world, spying on everyone the person comes in contact in day to day life, or, become aggressive and tries to destroy others who are thought to be the cause of the person’s losses. Such persons suffer from a persecution complex and will do everything in their power to subvert others, or, if they are submissive/shy/reticent/retreating, remove themselves from the scene by suicide. Whilst losing human life through suicide or unnatural death creates more losses to everyone connected to that person, aggression leads to socially unacceptable behavior and measures.

Whereas, these aspects apply to individuals, what happens to organizational entities, like say a colony, a family, a group of like-minded people, a corporate entity, or, even a government? In this case, there will be two types of behaviors; follow the leader or collective collapse. This behavior has been observed from time immemorial amongst kings, queens, rulers, dictators, military rulers, etc. and of late, a tendency of ‘collective collapse’ has also been seen in democratic governments.

During the years of ‘Cold War’, the so called democratic collective ‘Soviet Union’ suffered from this collective collapse and was imitated by a truly democratic USA. Every citizen was considered a possible threat to the sovereignty of the country and various draconian measures were taken to monitor the activities of each citizen. Every fundamental right in their respective Constitutions was violated. Any citizen, who opposed or even voiced an opinion against such measures, was supposedly removed overtly or covertly. All this happened ostensibly because; the concerned government had a persecution complex. One can see the high social cost of such a complex existing in a group of people.

Today, we are seeing the signs of such behavior in our own government because no politician wants to actually serve the nation or the citizens and the same line of thought seems to be subscribed by the bureaucracy also – all that the Legislature and Executive want is to serve themselves. They do not want transparency and cannot bear to think of a common man questioning their attitudes. Therefore, we are left with only the Judiciary fighting a lone battle. There are the bad guys in the Judiciary also, but, much less as compared to the Legislature and Executive. We see many things going wrong in our nation, but the one aspect we all respected were the exercise of fundamental rights without dilution. The imposition of Emergency during the reign of Indira Gandhi was an aberration till now, but lately, after many revelations in the media, the situation was not as rosy as one thought. Just recall the number of phone taps ordered! And now, the desire of the incumbent government to put a scanner on the electronic media in a manner that no citizen in this democratic nation of ours will have any fundamental right exercised!!!

So, is the government of Mr. Manmohan Singh suffering a collective persecution complex? The answer is there for all to see themselves.