The TV anchor onscreen gleefully informed us: “Crores of flags have been sold.” The 75th year of Indian Independence will be celebrated in style. The flags need not be hand-spun khadi any more. They can be machine-made polyester.

As the polyester flag-makers are set to mint bounties, the women-led hand-spun cottage industries for cotton flags are shattering in the shadows. The smiling TV anchor is not interested. It’s not a time for sob stories.

Every household will hoist the Tricolour. Voluntarily. No one is forcing anyone. Just that Uttarakhand BJP chief Gaurav Tiwari has instructed his party members to photograph every household that is not hoisting the Tricolour. In places where such explicit threats are not issued, people can feel the cold stare of surveillance scrutinising homes that do not unambiguously display the markers of patriotism to celebrate Freedom, voluntarily of course.

Now what if Afreen Fatima, student activist, decides to hoist the Tricolour on her home? Their house was bulldozed into rubble on the evening of June 12. She saw the bulldozing on live TV, celebrated by the same TV anchors, the chief cheerleaders of the ruling regime.

Afreen’s family had paid house tax dutifully for years but their house was suddenly declared illegal. This happened after her father was arrested the night before on the charge of being the “mastermind of the violence” that took place in Allahabad, after the derogatory remarks on Prophet Mohammad by Nupur Sharma.

Notwithstanding the fact that her mother is the actual owner of the house, a late-night notice issued in her father’s name asked them to vacate the property overnight. The regime now has the freedom to bulldoze people’s houses at will. Without any prior legal notification or proclamation of crime in any court of law.

So Afreen and her family cannot participate in #HarGharTiranga even if they want to. The same goes for 16 houses and 32 shops that were demolished in Khargon, 13 houses in Sendhwa, Madhya Pradesh. Or the 25 shops in Jahangirpuri, Delhi. These properties were demolished because the police deemed the owners to be part of protests that turned violent, even before any court found them guilty.

But then we saw far more violent protests against the Agniveer scheme of the government, where trains and buses were torched and policemen were stoned. Bulldozers did not roll on the streets for these protesters. The state clearly has the freedom to choose offenders and persecute them without any legal arbitration.

And the same goes for freedom of expression. For the first time since Independence, the citizens now measure every word that they utter, dialogues for movies that they write, jokes that they crack, songs that they sing, poems that they compose and so on. You never know which bizarre thing will “hurt the sentiments” of the majority community, which suffers from an incredible persecution complex.

In the first five years of the current dispensation, such expressions deemed pejorative by the majority were attacked by Internet trolls with their incessant abusive outrage. Now the law-enforcement agencies have stepped in. Multiple FIRs against people expressing dissent or humour or opinions are now registered rampantly. In effect, the police have now legalised trolling. Journalist and fact-checker Mohammad Zubair, after all, spent 23 days in jail for tweeting a funny film clip four years ago.

However, one can’t say there is absolute dearth of the freedom of expression in the country. Yati Narasinghanand, Ram Bhakt Gopal, Sadhvi Prachi, Bajrang Muni and the like issue sinister genocide calls against Muslims intermittently, in gatherings called “Dharma Sansads”.

They give open calls for armed attacks and subversion of the Constitution, issue rape threats to Muslim women…. The law-enforcement agencies blink and look away. They refuse to even register FIRs for hate speech against these howling hate-mongers. (They did register an FIR against Zubair, though, for calling them hate-mongers).

It’s not that Yati Narasinghanand has the freedom to abuse Muslims alone. He even gave an explicit call to boycott the Har Ghar Tiranga campaign. Yet, he is not arrested.

Cut back to the 2020 Delhi riots. Ragini Tiwari, who on the streets of Delhi spewed venom and gave a call for armed assault on Muslims by Hindus via Facebook Live while the riots were going on, is not named for her role in the riots.

My friend Umar Khalid, who gave a speech in Amravati in Maharashtra, where he specifically called for peace, denounced violence and upheld the Constitution, is being framed as the mastermind of the same riots, for that very speech. For two years now, the prosecution has not been able to present any credible evidence against him or other equal-citizenship protesters. Yet they are languishing in jail, as they are booked under the UAPA, the most draconian anti-terror law in the country.

So while celebrating Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, we may debate (or not), whether democracy has been liquidated or whether it’s a fascist overhaul.

But since freedom to think has not been proscribed yet, while walking down the streets of Delhi, when I see those fluttering objects, I do think to myself what they have really come to mean to us.

⚫ Banojyotsna Lahiri is a Delhi-based researcher and activist who did her PhD from the Centre for the Study of Social Systems at JNU