September 17th, 2011
Everybody knew that lokpal bill or Janlokpal bill will reduce civil liberties and hence some of us tried to oppose it. It was good. However, we all of us also know that much more than the Janlokpal bill, the UID will affect our lives. We aren’t in governmental sector, most of us doesn’t belong to Big industrialist families, obviously, Janlokpal or lokpal isn’t going to affect our lives directly (however, it may reduce the speed of governmental works, but then, it is certainly good, the less the government works, the better it is)
But almost every second person/Indian citizen will be hugely affected by UID, everyone of us will lose our civil liberties and will certainly face a danger of Identity crisis. We know a huge amount of money is being wasted in this ridiculously tyrannical idea of Government yet, there is hardly any voice against UID in general and on Face book in particular. We know UID is the making of an Orwellian world where the Big Brother will have complete control on our yet secluded life.
So why are we so unconcerned about our civil liberties which will directly be harassed by the UID and why were we so actively against the Janlokpal while we knew it is hardly going to affect our lives?
I guess it is the Crowd Mentality which victimized us. We do not oppose UID with such vociferousness because most of us are suffering with the Conformation Bias, most of us believe that government is our guard and will safeguard us. This crowd mentality forced us to ignore the repercussions of UID and we almost accepted it without any opposition or we are at the brink of accepting it, on the other hand, since most of us believe that UPA government is chosen by us (Ha? not even 25% of all Adult Indians voted for UPA) we realized that we should oppose Anna Hajare and his gang as they were somehow talking against government. Many of us even didn’t realize why to oppose Janlokpal and obviously, most of us do not realize why to oppose UID and that is why there is no solid appreciable opposition against UID, why did we fall prey to this crowd mentality?
There may be one more reason, maybe we used Anna Hajare and many similar issues (like Environmentalism) because we realize that the mass media is already raising these issues so somehow these issues became important for us, and since we wanted to present something different, we opposed environmentalism, we opposed Janlokpal, while UID since always is considered to be something which will help Indian citizens (while in reality it is just going to be bane and a threat for common citizens) hence we accepted it without any noise. We were fooled by our confirmation bias and our crowd mentality, yet most of us claims that we are Individuals.