Dear people across the echo-chamber,
You, the proponents of BJP and cheerleaders of Mr Modi, I write this today directly to you. It’s been a difficult few days and I’m finding it hard to wrap my head around everything that has happened since the election results were announced. Difficult because of the tectonic shift our country is experiencing.
On 28th July 2018, the people of Pakistan, the supposed terrorist state, unanimously rejected Hafiz Saeed and his party Allaha-u-Akbar Tehreek (AAT), which as a result got a sum total of zero seats in the national elections.
On 23th May 2019, we the people of India selected Sadhvi Pragya Thakur to represent us in the parliament of our country. The new poster girl of Hindutva is famed for her alleged connection to the Malegaon bomb blast. ‘Famed’ because, I believe, today when you are accused of nationalist crimes, they are no longer considered crimes but sometimes result in the accused becoming celebrities.
It has become difficult to accept that today we have normalised hate so much that someone like Sadhvi Pragya will represent India’s citizens in its parliament. Since the foundations of this new India have been laid, increasingly disturbing reports have started coming in. In Begusarai a man was stopped and shot after attackers asked for his name, and they decided that he ‘belonged to Pakistan’; recently in Gurgaon, next to the national capital, a man was assaulted for wearing a traditional skull cap.
But it’s not these reports themselves that are disturbing, as I always expected that Modi 2.0 would become a reality; it is the swiftness with which all this happened that I find alarming.
The fact of the matter is that such reports and instances are just the beginning to the glorious new dawn and reports such as these will be nothing but forgotten footnotes when the sublime new chapters of revised Indian history are written. Chapters which will boast about how India became free from the shackles of secularism, where people didn’t require food and better standards of living but rather ate nationalism for a living; where segregation based on “us versus them” became the new normal, where the “others” were those who had been living in these lands since forever but still remained the “others” and where your name became your greatest strength and for some ended up being their biggest curse.
Dear people from the other end,
When all this is done and dusted and the idea of India has been eroded beyond repair, I will not hold the hate manufacturing BJP or tokenism promoting Congress as responsible.
They are political parties doing what political parties are meant to do.
The next time a city burns in the name of any reservation or if the valour of a fictional Rajput queen is questioned and results in acts that tarnish the respect of the entire community, or when a ‘mastane baba’ is caught in his ‘mastane habits’ and the entire town is held ransom by his supporters, I won’t hold the goons responsible.
They are Frankenstein’s monsters and out of sheer habit, they will do what monsters should do.
No, I will hold you responsible.
You, who willingly chose to look the other way when hate was being sold or worse consumed it to whet your appetite.
When that day comes, I will hold you responsible.
Yours,
A Countryman