Soul Talk With Devdutt Patnaik: Decoding Blame-Game in Politics

Editor: Puneet Bhatia
Illustrator: Mehul Tyagi
Producer: Prabuddha Jain

In a special series by Quint Hindi, mythologist and bestselling writer Devdutt Patnaik talks about the connection between life and today’s political scenario.

In the first episode of this series we asked him the following question:

In today’s day and age, why do we more often see politicians engaged in blame-game rather than worried about the citizens’ well-being?

This is what he had to say:

Nobody is Ready to Take Responsibility

Devdutt mentions the story of Adam and Eve from the Holy Bible. Only after consuming the forbidden fruit, did Adam and Eve land on earth, all the trouble began after that. When they were asked as to why did they do that, there could have been two answers to this:

1. We made a mistake
2. We were provoked by the devil to do this

Devdutt says that the society is always looking for an easy way out. They always want to put the blame on somebody else. We never take time out for self-introspection to figure out that why did we break a rule. We always look for some ‘devil’ to put the blame on. We never try and correct ourselves.

Politicians Take Advantage of This Scenario

Politicians never say that there is a problem in them, they always say that the problem is outside. This has become the norm in democracy now. Today, when politicians make speeches, they always look for somebody else to blame. When they find that someone, they put the entire blame on him for all the problems in the country. They accuse each other on the basis of religion, caste, and gender.

All the politicians today, whether right-wing or leftists, follow this common ideology. All politicians find a ‘devil’ in their speeches as this the easy way out. Then starts the hideous round of blame-game. With this they try and escape the fact that they have to look within for mistakes rather than finding faults outside.

(This story was originally published in Hindi Quint.)