The Indian nation appears to be fast sinking into an acute social and economic uncertainty and distress. The government has been insulting the intelligence of this nation by ridiculing and questioning the expertise of academicians, intellectuals and journalists who question the establishment. No sooner there is negative publicity, the Government, as usual, only accelerates its sales talk to deny the reality and insist that “all is well’. The nation is made to believe that those who criticise the government’s policies and signature schemes are those who cannot digest the success of this government.
The touts of the political establishment have been aggressively marketing a perception that the politicians in the current government are avatars of God and therefore infallible and invincible. The response to criticism from the intellectuals and experts is countered by the government with scripted one way media debates. Its super Prime Minister avoids spontaneous TV interviews and resorts to one way lectures instead. One needs to take a cue from the recent comment of the film star Hrithik Roshan in regard to certain rumours about him in the media, wherein he said, “When truth suffers, the collective consciousness suffers”. This applies to the current political reality in our country. The survival of democracy and diversity in India will depend very much on the state of the collective consciousness of its citizens. While ‘Swacch Bharat’ gets trumpeted from the roof tops, ‘Sachh Bharat’ or ‘Satya Bharat’ is being trampled under the feet.
Figuring out the political truth nowadays has become extremely difficult with the goal posts for assessing governance being shifted as per political convenience. When the opposition criticised governments and defamed Prime Ministers for over 60 years after independence of the country, it was justified as optimism and nationalism. With the role reversal after 2014, the same is now pessimism and anti-national. When the shoe was worn on the left foot it constituted a stinking ‘lie’. No sooner the very same shoe got worn on the right foot the same lie has become a harmless ‘jumla’ or a ‘tongue in cheek’.
The Government in the last three years is functioning more like some corporate firm showcasing its products with a battery of salesmen employed to aggressively, and even violently, market recycled stuff by claiming it to be innovative and original. The serious defects in the product are kept under wraps while playing up insignificant positives. The Government seems more fixated on the fiscal gains and military might of the nation than on social welfare of its citizens. Novel and attractive slogans are all that get thrown up on a quarterly basis to distract the citizens.
Before the people can even figure out what was meant by ‘Acche din’ and the people of Goa still wondering what ‘Parivartan’ and ‘Goykarponn’ is all about, they are slapped with yet another slogan of ‘New India 2022’.
Probably, to understand what this ‘New India’ actually implies, it may require the people of this nation to commit yet another political blunder in the 2019 general elections.
For the moment, only two categories of citizens seem to exist in Bharat for the government, one optimist and the other pessimist. The optimists are those who never question and only sing hallelujahs to the government. They prostrate if asked to bend.
The pessimists are all the remaining who question the government and unearth the stink, comprising of communists, secularists, minorities, Dalits, rationalists, journalists, and the rest of the critics. Leaving aside the cheap attempt at equating himself with Gandhiji, the words of the PM of the country when he says, “a thousand Gandhis or a lakh of Modis can’t clean India without 125 crore people” are contrary to his government’s actions.
Who is it that makes an all-out effort to disrupt the financial health of non-Hindutva civil society groups involved in community development and social welfare? Who is it that is working day and night to destroy the livelihood opportunities of the minorities and dalits in the country?
Exclusion has become the culture of current politics and claiming just the opposite of what is actually being done on the ground has become the new normal for governance.
More than a ‘Swacch Bharat’ campaign which provides photo ops for the high and mighty, the struggle right now for every patriotic citizen concerned about the survival of democracy and diversity in this country is to protect the mind from contamination with communal filth.
For Gandhiji, the cleanliness of the mind and soul were as much necessary as external cleanliness. That is why Gandhiji had said, “I will not let anyone walk through my mind with dirty feet”. Preventing fake news from becoming the truth and motives for seclusion and exclusion from being assumed to be constructive government policy is the urgent challenge before citizens right now.
https://www.heraldgoa.in/Edit/Opinions/Truths-vs-Jumlas/121204.html
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