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By
this reckoning, even Hobson's choice is a choice! And the world
over the common man, more often than not, faces Hobson's choice.
He can either take what he is offered, on those very rare occasions
when he is offered something, or leave it. For instance, a highly
educated young man is offered a job and a pay both of which would
seem to mime his academic achievements. What is the choice before
him? He can either accept the offer or reject it. By no species
of courtesy can that be described as a choice.
Not long ago there was a report in newspapers that some highly qualified
Indian medical practitioners, who had gone to a Western country
after signing a job contract, were eking out their lives by dusting
tables in restaurants! Could they have settled for such menial work
out of choice? On the contrary, if they had had one, they would
perhaps have returned to their country to set up practice. By the
same token, a sizable section of people in the advanced countries
live on doles because they have no jobs. Are they exercising their
choice?
However, in the domains of politics and administration, not to speak
of big business, there is always a multiplicity of choices. Politicians
can switch from one party to another with a straight face. The party
that has grazing, so to speak, and can offer a public office readily
embraces such defectors. Ideological allegiances and political convictions
are all fictions created to fool the electorate. There are multiple
parties in most democracies, and each one of them is eager to swell
its ranks. Politicians, therefore, see no merit in sticking to a
party on whose tickets they may have got elected but which is in
no position to yield any material benefits. Coalition governments
would otherwise not be possible. Besides, no field offers as many
opportunities for making as much money as politics does. And those
who are in politics are not motivated by considerations of public
service. They want to make as much money as they can while they
can, and then vanish from the scene. This may not be true of all
democracies, but it is certainly true of most democracies.
Similarly, bureaucrats seldom, if ever, are without a choice. They
may quit government service any time they like because they invariably
have waiting for them cushy jobs in the private sector in return
for the services rendered to individual companies while in the employ
of the government. Even those who retire from government service
take up much better jobs in the private sector the next day, again
as a quid pro quo for the services rendered. And many of those government
officials who are sacked for disobeying their political masters
could not care less because they will by then have built a neat
nest egg.
Therefore, it is the common people who are almost always without
a choice, except perhaps that between life and death. Some of them
exercise that choice, but that is no choice at all. It is pure sophistry
to say that choices have diminished with steep increase in the population
of the world. That does not answer the question why the available
choices cannot be equitably distributed among all people.
To put it bluntly, some sections of modern society have monopolized
all choices to the detriment of the individual. Society now decides
who shall have what. What it does not realize until it is faced
with an explosive situation is that it had an obligation to ensure
that every individual member had a choice in all matters, and that
it had failed to fulfill that obligation. When such of its members
as have no choice, except political choice which does not mean much
in the absence of economic choice, feel forced to resort to violence,
the self-same society accuses them of trying to destabilize it.
In sum, absence of choice is what the masses the world over have
learnt to live with, and exercise of choice has become the prerogative
of the rich and the influential, politicians, bureaucrats and Big
Business.
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