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MOVIE lovers from my generation can probably recall the movie, Trading Places; in essence a tragedy but deceptively depicted as a comedy, starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd.
The storyline in brief is that the Duke brothers, influential and respected commodity traders, have bribed someone, which happens all the time in business, to get a government report in advance on oranges, pursuant to their business plan of making a killing on the commodities market and getting richer. And obviously, there is nothing illegal with having a business plan to get richer.
The reality is that across the globe today, income inequality is simply accepted as collateral damage for growth; the rich need to get richer so that they can create more employment for the poor!
Horrendously, the villainous ungrateful employees of the Dukes, characters played by Messrs Eddie and Dan, steal — which is a criminal offence — and substitute the report — thereby conning — another offence, the Dukes into betting on the wrong side of the market, and the poor chaps end up losing their shirts. And this dastardly deed is supposedly done in the name of revenge, pursuant to a personal bet between the Duke brothers, who are simply trying to find answers to an intellectual riddle; nothing wrong with that. History is replete with instances where the rich experimented on the poor, or took them for granted, in the noble pursuit of commercial and technological development...
It’s not illegal to have a business plan to get richer...
While the movie does correctly depict that trade without physical exchange of underlying goods is primarily speculative in nature and akin to gambling, it counterfactually promotes, once again, the absolutely false notion that underdogs can win; in the real world they never do.
On the other hand, perhaps Hollywood’s obsession with victorious underdogs, and also that of all other similar “Woods”, may have to do with the fact that their audience primarily is the underdog. Cinema is the poor man’s entertainment; it allows him to dream and have hope. Imagine, in a world devoid of any illusion of the underdog winning, the ruled would have a hopeless existence which would ultimately result in chaos.
Arguably, as far as providing hope for the underdog goes, democracy is perhaps the true claimant to the throne. And if making movies closer to real life where the underdog always gets kicked in the nether regions is fatal for cinema, legislators’ selling their votes during Senate polls is an existential threat for democracy. For if the ECP’s notice of horse-trading allegations in the Senate, pursuant to all major parties levelling accusations against each other, results in incriminating findings, that might be, in substance, democracy’s obituary, signed sealed and delivered.
If at all hundreds of crores were responsible for the election of the chairman, Senate, then rationally speaking, the argument that all this money was spent with the honourable objective of getting an opportunity for serving the nation is, at best, amusing. Righteous men, for whatever reason, are not known to trade their conscience.
Further, admission that the precious one vote is a tradable commodity, consequently provides credence to the notion that democracy is comparable with trading places of the genre satirised here and hence another opportunity for the rich to get richer; such an admission can potentially bring down democracy’s house of cards! And let’s not even go down the proof of corruption path.
So, isn’t it baffling that the electronic media, a key beneficiary and hence an ardent supporter of democracy, provided, thoughtlessly I might add, camera eye and hence credibility to all the rumours relating to trading of horses in the Senate? On a lighter note, a little horse, well because birdies stand discredited already, has informed me, based on credible sources that horses may be contemplating a dharna at D-Chowk to protest against defamation.
They do have a point. Spending money to buy votes in the Senate does not strictly fall in the definition of political horse-trading which term is simply indicative of complex and shrewd bargaining and reciprocal concessions; a bit of horse sense is required!
Nonetheless, perhaps all is not lost; the common man neither has the wherewithal nor the time to deduce the obvious, except until it hits him in the face. Democracy, its beneficiaries and its supporters should forthwith denounce and completely wash their hands off the ‘frivolous’ rumours that crores were spent on the Senate chairman election and build the narrative that everyone voted according to their conscious, righteously!
Alternatively, should this conspiracy linger on or get noticed higher up the legal ladder, there is a risk that voters might eventually realise that democracy is just another illusion created to provide hope to the underdogs; in real life they never win.
The writer is a chartered accountant based in Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, March 28th, 2018
