Our silences are adding up, will rebound upon us

How wonderful to live in a country where everything has been done before.

Spying on citizens via a military-use spyware? Chanakya had recommended spying in 300 BC, you anti-national western-educated know-nothing! How dare you insult our greatest political strategist – after the BJP’s Amit Shah of course – in this manner? If Chanakya recommended it, obviously India’s greatest government ever will follow it.

You say India is moving towards fascism under Modi ji? How about the fact that fascism was born in Italy? The whole Congress party comes from Italy. So, you will support Congress Party but blame Modi ji for fascism? You liberals are so negative and mean all the time. You will eat pizza and say Fascism.

Attacking journalists? Don’t you know about Indira Gandhi’s Emergency? Modi ji has just ensured that journalists crawl all the time or face the consequences.

Police action also you don’t like. Always Gestapo, gestapo, Stasi, stasi. You don’t see the USA Police, how tagda and strong they are? Big, big guns they carry. All my cousins in US are very frightened of them. They ask, why should Indians not be more scared of the police in India. Modi ji believes that the world is one family, so he always listens to NRI people. You get the drift?

Economic collapse? The world suffered one in the 1930s. Pandemic? The Spanish Flu killed millions. A neighbour murdered his brother? Cain and Abel.

Thus, we willingly surrender our democratic rights to forces who want to control us for their own power games. You might be tempted to argue that everyone who gets into politics wants to control us and remove our democratic rights.

Let’s not argue that point, contentious and somewhat erroneous as it is. Instead, here’s a question for us: Do we have to succumb?

What’s in it for us, the people, in the long run? What’s it been for any population ruled by an iron, unyielding hand for generations? Is North Korea our goal? Saudi Arabia? Party rule in China? Stalin’s USSR? You dream of rotting in the Gulag so you can write a book like Solzhenitsyn?

After you have killed and incarcerated people of all the religions you dislike, locked up and tortured women, turned those you consider below you into slaves, what do you imagine your life will be like? Will the Leader and his coterie share the spoils with you as you while away your days covered in ghee and khoya?

Whatever fool’s paradise you concoct in your head, it’s not going to happen. The more we do nothing or worse, do not take it seriously, when ordinary citizens, journalists, business people, investigative officers, judges are found to have been spied upon by the Government, the more you look back into the distant past to justify the State allowing the police to book anyone they wish under the National Security Act, when the police continue to use a law struck down years ago to imprison people, when the Government lies about the devastating deaths caused by a pandemic and takes vindictive action against those who reports on the suffering…all these silences add up. They rebound on you. And the consequences will be borne by all of us.

Democracy is an uneasy balance between those in power and those who have given them that power. This power is a contract, a timebound contract, with checks and balances. It’s not a blank cheque. How’s this for learning from the past: remember that any time those who hand over power temporarily have been lax, the result has been disaster.

This spurious argument that someone else did it in the past and that’s why it’s okay to slap sedition charges on a cartoonist for being critical of a government functionary, or some ancient scripture says women should stay home and that’s why you can sexually assault a woman who is not at home has to stop being taken seriously.

Human nature is such that almost everything has happened before. We use our heads, and we weigh up what the past has given us and sift what is worth keeping, what is worth remembering and what is worth discarding. There is no rule that says we have to be both all obedient and permanently brainless all the time.

(Views are personal)