Do you need to be whipped or flogged Taliban style? One incident and a news report this week struck me as provoking deep thought. A Hindu friend of mine embraced Islam. He confided to me that he liked his new religion because it imposed discipline and morality on pain of flogging, stoning and death!

‘I need to be forced to do anything at all’ he conceded. Now for the news report, here is an extract. April 23 (Bloomberg) – Jackie Chan is facing calls for a boycott of his films after he said “chaotic conditions” in Hong Kong and Taiwan showed that unless Chinese people were controlled, they would do whatever they wanted.

Coming to my friend, there is a body of thought that suggests that at least some people need external force to get them to obey even simple rules and codes of conduct. When you assess my friend’s viewpoint with Jackie Chan’s lament and juxtapose these with the Indian middle class yearning for a dictatorship to stem the ‘rot in India’s public life’ you can see a common thread. Large masses of people feel the need for external sticks and intrinsic motivators will not suffice.

In India I have seen only the middle class show a love of the military boot. The poor show no such desire. Tragically and paradoxically it is the middle class that shows indiscipline, is part of the corruption scene, and has benefited from the inequities of the system. Yet it is this class that bemoans the rot in public life.

It is this class again that lauds India’s only brush so far with dictatorship—the period of Emergency. When you ask a typical middle class Indian what he liked about the Emergency chances are he will tell you that the ‘trains ran on time, people came to office punctually’.

In other words he concedes that his class of people needs a whip to make them do even elementary duties. No recognition form this class of the evils that the poor had to endure during the Emergency at the hands of Sanjay Gandhi and his goons .The poor are not part of his area of concern.

One more paradox, any individual votaries of military rule will declare that he is personally disciplined, does all duties diligently, and is punctual. It is the ‘other guys’ who need to be whipped into discipline!

My friend who embraced Islam at least was honest enough to admit that he needed disciplining.

K.R.RAVI