In a polity where there is hardly any link between what is said by the leader and what is delivered by the establishment, we need to diagnose the disease, and look for remedy. India is in such a stage.
Prime Minister Modi spoke for eighty-two minutes from the ramparts of the Red Fort. Modi addressed 17,000 people assembled there ––10,000 security personnel, and 7,000 specially invited guests, twice ‘security-screened’ using the state-of-the-art face recognition technique, probably from Israel which also supplied the cyberweapon Pegasus to India and many other countries.
The ratio of 10 to 7 between the security forces and the rest reminds me of Egypt under Hosni Mubarak. On a visit to Cairo in 2015, I was told by my Egyptian friends that under Mubarak if 30 citizens gathered for a simple meeting or a demonstration, there would be 100 policemen, always outnumbering the citizens.
While Modi, inaugurating the Seventy-sixth Independence Day, waxed eloquent on his achievements since taking over office in 2014, and of his plans for the next twenty-five years till independent India completed its first centenary, his followers in Gujarat committed an atrocity, an atrocity only they could have committed, by garlanding in public 11 men convicted for rape and murder, released criminally by the state government. That atrocity was the way Modi’s followers chose to celebrate Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav (75 years of India’s Independence.)
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