For the first time ever, this weekend we will be having our church service, not on a Sunday but the evening prior.
Sunday being the last day of polling and to be quite frank, much like the recent episodes of Game of Thrones, we will be glad to be just done with it, one way or the other, once and for all. This exercise over the past 40 odd days has been, in various degrees, greatly disturbing and the endless vitriolic name calling has reached saturation point; much like the horrible boil that perches itself in unmentionable places, the pus hardening, red and swollen before its final lance.
This week as the soaring heat dances in waves across the sullen landscape, there is another, far greater scorching wave on the rise, threatening to burn everything in its wake. It is a shrill crescendo that has so far been ruthless in silencing those that attempt to question it and one which we saw coming, but were either too tired, too indifferent, or too frightened to care. A wave fed by fear, coupled with the arrogance of privilege and a sense of entitlement.
It is a classic ‘the aliens are coming!’ manoeuvre, and by that, I do not mean the extra-terrestrial kind. Perhaps if it were, it would probably have garnered us all together instead of the fragmented chaos that we see unfurling every day. No this is different, yet a time proven tactic still the same.
And yet, we continue to neglect the obvious.
And by we, I refer to the mainstream media that seems to be far more concerned with wallets and mangoes and pakoras rather than hospitals without beds and oxygen, cities and towns choking on polluted air or on the poor state of educational institutions where a little over one-third of all children who enrol in grade 1 manage to complete or reach grade 8 and at least 35 million children aged 6 – 14 years do not attend school at all.
In our nation, 45 farmers commit suicide every day. Every. Day. Let that sink in. That’s 1,350 in a month and 16, 200 in a year. The most - 17,368 - suicides over the last 10 years were reported in 2009.
As many as 39 crimes against women were reported every hour in India, up from 21 in 2007, according to Crime in India 2016 report by the National Crime Records Bureau. The rate of crimes against women – crimes per 100,000 female population – was 55.2 in 2016, up from 41.7 in 2012.
The unemployment rate in India hit 6.1% in 2017-18, the highest the country has seen in the last 45 years with more than 650 million or 65 crores of young people currently unemployed.
And yet, this election season, there is only this. The strident, harsh vocals of supposed nationalism.
Stripped of all pretensions, there is a singular cry, that of a ‘Hindu’ Rasthra, further validated by the recent statement put out, “We will ensure implementation of NRC in the entire country. We will remove every single infiltrator from the country, except Buddha (sic), Hindus and Sikhs”.
There are calls every day, of phrases that must be repeated, to prove that you are not an anti-national. Phrases invoking the gods, the motherland; oh and let us not forget the mandatory standing to attention every single time prior to watching something on the big screen. Sound familiar?
Nothing wrong with any of the above. Except that when one is forced to, shouted and screamed at, to prove your loyalty, “the nation wanting to know”, then of course, obviously it is no longer that. A choice we wish to make. Instead it stands perilously close to being dictatorial.
To put it in perspective, here’s a quote oft seen on the internet. And apologies in advance for the analogy.
“Love is like a fart. If you have to force it, it’s probably s**t.”
So here we are, a week away from the results. In all probability it will be the current ruling party that will win. A frightening thought. Far more frightening still is the reality that we, through our collective silence, our “it’s not my problem anyway” because it obviously has not affected us, yet, have come to this.
This. Where a body of a human scavenger still continues to be brought out, lifeless, suffocated and buried underneath human scum, literally and figuratively and where his entire community is doomed to that life because of what?
This. Where one can say whatever the heck they want, including maligning the fallen and get away with it with impunity, because after all, people are just expressing their personal opinions.
This. Where what you eat, or what supposedly you were intending to eat can kill you. Yeah. That.
Perhaps they are right. A Hindu state is just what might be needed. And while we are at it, let’s not just stop there. Feel free to have your own state, but give us ours as well. The south, theirs, the north-east, heck it’s a different time zone altogether, while the North can squabble over who calls dibs on capital city, Indraprastha anyone? And be done with it.
Democracy is dead. Long live democracy.
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