They have not burnt our homes,
nor driven us across a border.
They have done something quieter:
erased our names and called it law and order.
From north to south, east to west,
millions stand in endless queues,
clutching papers to prove they belong,
to prove they exist,
to prove they have the right
to speak in the land they call their own.
What kind of republic demands
that its children prove their birthright?
What kind of freedom makes the citizen
a suspect in their own country?
Behind official desks,
behind the cold blue glow of screens,
a keystroke becomes a weapon,
an algorithm becomes a sieve,
and prejudice puts on the robes of law.
A name disappears.
A voice is extinguished.
A citizen becomes a stranger
in the land of their ancestors.
Not one.
Not a hundred. Millions.
And those who hold the highest chairs,
raised by the very hands they now discard,
bend the law, break the rules,
and write new ones to preserve their power.
They call it procedure.
They call it verification.
But what do we call the deliberate
erasure of a people’s right to be heard?
Treason need not carry a foreign flag.
Sometimes it wears an official seal,
speaks in the language of the law,
and quietly murders democracy
one name at a time.
You may delete a name from a register,
but you cannot delete a life from history.
You may silence a voice on paper,
but you cannot make injustice truth
by stamping it with authority.
Remember, you keepers of the ledger:
the people are not yours to count out.
The law is not yours to weaponise.
The Republic is not your private inheritance.
One day, history will open your books
and ask what no title can answer:
Who gave you the right to erase
the very people in whose name you rule?
For a democracy is not a flag,
a slogan, a seal, or a throne.
It is the people’s right to count.
And when the powerful decide
that millions shall no longer count,
the question is no longer
whether democracy is in danger.
The question is:
who is committing the crime against it?
***
Madras Courier originally ran as a broadsheet with a poetry section. It was a time when readers felt comfortable sharing glimpses of their lives through verse. If you have a poem you’d like to submit, do email us at editor@madrascourier.com.
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