This is a hurried state of the nation report on a nation in a state. Hurried because there’s too little time left, the palpitating countdown to preparations has begun, in the snap of a couple of days we would have emblazoned upon ourselves, jauntily and unilaterally, a never-before, never-hereafter monogram: Vishwaguru.
A recent Pew Research Center report on Vishwaguru India’s global influence revealed its favourability ratings had dipped in most of the 24 countries polled other than Nigeria and Kenya. Only 37% trusted Prime Minister Narendra Modi to do ‘the right thing’ in world affairs. But Pew is a Western agency and we have been told to be sceptical of negative assessment, if not altogether dismissive and hostile. Nothing Western is of value unless it is validation, which we breathlessly seek.
As I write this, the capital city of what Modi calls the ‘mother of democracy’ is turning into an enactment of totalitarian advisories, being barricaded against its own citizenry in preparation for the G20 gala it is to host. A temporary blockage has been decreed on the heart of town — shops, schools, offices, enterprises, nothing is to work, even the shadows have been ordered still as khaki platoons and municipal apparatchik go about purposing a besieged, flower-potted garrison that is to stage the crowning pageant.
Five months have ticked over since fires broke out in Manipur and were allowed to score scars that will rebuff healing. Close to two hundred people have died, inestimable property destroyed, and multiple thousands displaced in the process of forging a bitter ethnic divide. Women have been stripped, raped, paraded and filmed; worse was done to them than the viral circulation of their pain. The prime minister has not gone to Manipur; he has spoken of Manipur for a few odd minutes. Such are our priorities.
The chief minister of Manipur, N. Biren Singh, set his police after a fact-finding team of the Editors Guild of India whose report had damned him as, among other things, patently partisan. Earlier, when clips of the horror done to Manipuri women surfaced, Singh’s first resort was to locate the source of the “leak”, not the perpetrators of the crime. Such too are our priorities. In Kashmir just last week, the police threatened legal action against a BBC report on the throttling of the media. Never mind where irony found refuge. India this year has slipped to 161 out of 180 nations on the Press Freedom Index, twenty spots below Somalia, which has no record of making claims to mothering democracy.
India has also been rated “partly free” by the Washington-based rights advocacy body, Freedom House, mainly on account of how imperilled our minorities have come to be. But Freedom House is an agency of the West, best disregarded. Let’s examine our conduct ourselves. A schoolteacher instructs her class to take turns at thrashing a fellow student because he is a Muslim, then says she doesn’t regret what she did. A uniformed jawan walks up and down a moving train, marks out Muslim men by their looks, uses his service weapon to kill them and then delivers a cold sermon on what’s acceptable and what’s not. Later, he says given the chance, he’d have killed more. Sectarian hate has been whipped and served from the highest quarters in recent years and the street allowed to wreak unspeakable violations. The shape of justice is quite often a bulldozer whose wanton marauding nothing seems to be able to check. The absence of disapproval at all or any of this is deafening; it speaks to collective corruption and collective failure. The dog-whistler of violence has a seat in government. Convicted rapists and murderers are free and openly felicitated. Those who have demanded their fundamental freedoms and invoked constitutional rights are in prison. Should it be any surprise that record numbers of Indians are forsaking their citizenship and seeking out lives elsewhere?
The ruling party is out on the offensive in defence of a brutally oppressive caste system and daring the Opposition to take on its sectarian populism. The head of its IT cell is a flagrant propagandist of lies and poisoned prejudice. But the IT cell is but a part, although a critical part, of the larger scheme. There are also, for instance, the ED and the CBI, never mind that they are entities of government and not of the party, such distinction may no longer count for much. Nation, Party, Leader, Government — they have come to denote one cohabitation. And so, depending on how ill- or well-behaved you are to that one purpose, agencies like the ED and the CBI can either have you in their crosshairs or airbrush you out of trouble. In ideology, tactics and optics, it is almost a carbon impress of the Hitlerian playbook. The Modi cabinet is barely embarrassed that it trots out in public fashioned after a brigade of HMV sycophants. Almost nothing that the ministers of the Union do is not courtesy pradhan mantriji or, simply, Modiji, the one and only. So unyieldingly the one and only that when the nation held its breath and its eyeballs on Chandrayaan-3 landing live on the moon, the euphoric moment of touchdown had to be obscured because the cameras had to be turned on Modiji beaming live and beatifically from a far corner of the world. You’re about to be treated to a more wholesome, and probably uninterrupted, encore. Keep watching. We are a spectacle.
PS: The Chinese supremo will be missed in the Vishwaguru gaieties, but we shall not draw advantage from his absence to mention the great land grab up north which we do not know to have happened. Jai Bharat.
sankarshan.thakur@abp.in
