When democracy screams

Friday 8th January, 2021

The hurly-burly’s done, and the battle’s lost and won, in the US. The Congress has certified Joe Biden as the next US President. America has got a decent leader. What we witnessed on Wednesday was a Dickensian paradox. It was a sad day for the US; the American democracy came under attack in an unprecedented manner. It was also a happy day for the US, for its democracy demonstrated its resilience.

Mobocracy. Insurrection. Terrorism. These were some of the terms the western media and irate US politicians used to describe Wednesday’s protest in Washington, DC, where angry Trump supporters laid siege to the Capitol, the sanctum sanctorum of US democracy while a joint congressional session was in progress to certify Biden’s win. Clashes that ensued between the protesters and the police left four persons dead and several others injured.

Thankfully, the mobs could not deter the Congress from carrying out its constitutional duty. President Donald Trump made a virtue of necessity; he assured that there would be an orderly transition on 20 January, when Biden will be sworn in as the 46th US President. One, however, cannot be so optimistic as to say all’s well that ends well. The United States is divided perhaps as never before. Rancour is bubbling forth from political fissures at all levels of the American polity. Biden has undertaken to help his beloved country heal fast. Let him be wished good luck.

There had been some interesting arguments both for and against some Republicans’ objections to the certification of the electoral votes in the Congress by the time all hell broke loose and the Capitol floor had to be evacuated. The proponents of those forceful arguments and equally effective counterarguments were very articulate yet obviously prejudiced. One camp summarily dismissed the allegations of vote rigging as baseless claims by a desperate loser and his frustrated backers; no room should be left for the image of the US to be tarnished, they said, maintaining that Trump’s allegations would only cause the American public to lose their faith in their election system. Others, who backed Trump, claimed they were also patriots and their allegations had to be probed if the US democracy was to be safeguarded; that was the way to restore the people’s faith in the election system, they held. Both sides had points.

The general consensus is that Biden won fairly and squarely, and Trump is behaving like a bear with a sore head, unable to stomach his humiliating defeat. But the question is whether the incumbent US President’s claim that there were election frauds should go uninvestigated.

The US went to war when President George W. Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and the only way to save the world was to bomb Iraq back to the Stone Age. So, it is puzzling why the Congress did not order a probe, based on the incumbent President’s claim that the 2020 presidential election was marred by malpractices.

Doubts are bound to linger about the alleged polls frauds despite the Congressional certification of the presidential election outcome. The Congress goes by majority decisions, and the judiciary by what is placed before it. The only way to get at the truth and put the matter to rest would have been for the Congress to appoint an ad hoc committee, as demanded by the pro-Trump Republicans, to conduct an emergency audit of the results in the disputed states. Such action would have helped clear doubts in the minds of not only Americans but also their counterparts elsewhere about the aforesaid allegations.

The reaction of the western media to the Capitol siege was interesting. Their much-flaunted objectivity fell by the wayside. They let their emotions get the better of them, bemoaning the siege. Some news anchors even called protesters idiots and faulted the National Guard for not rushing in to abort what they called a coup. True, the desecration of the Capitol was despicable, but what we saw on Wednesday was not a coup as such. Some countries have experienced far worse situations, which the US was instrumental in engineering. Several such incidents come to mind; one being the CIA-backed coup in Chile in 1973. It is good that the US and its allies have realised that assault on democracy hurts!