O my companion, how can I utter words of praise for such evils in human manifestation?
How can I call the dark night the dawn? How can I call the toxic fumes as morning breeze?
How can I refer to man as God?
Speak the truth and you will be flogged and imprisoned, this life is caught in the grip of lies,
Human beings are cowering in terror while blood sucking monsters are on the rampage.
-Habib Jalib
The nation has been hit by a blood stained wave, a tidal wave which has the blood of innumerable innocent lives slain on its name, may it be the Godhra Riots or the Babri Masjid demolition, the ‘inhuman’ wave of fascism. And, taking the advantage of the amassing of the popular support for the Hindu forces, there has been a marked increase in the memberships and support of the minority forces in the country.
Survey shows that more than half of the memberships of the Muslim student organisations come from the states like Gujarat and Maharashtra, where the rightist forces are at their strongest. The dilapidated condition of the Muslims in Gujarat is an open secret; the shroud of centralised development has camouflaged the situation of minorities there. The incessant speeches delivered by our respected PM to work in favour and for the minorities have turned out to be nothing but a ‘chunavi jhumla’.
If we make a brief tour of the year that has gone by with the BJP government at the centre, we can see that The Sangh Parivar has been repeatedly reconstructing the past for its present benefits. From the ban on beef in certain states to stating the presence of aeroplanes and nuclear bombs during the Vedic age without any proof to the efforts of thwarting democratic groups, during the past one year it has done everything that the government of a secular state like India should not have done.
There have been the introduction of textbooks which say that the consumption of non-vegetarian food cause the emergence of dark thoughts, and not only that, there have been instances when even MPs have been found openly preaching that eating chowmein, one of the main food items of the Asian communities in the country causes the urge to rape. The ban on beef, though proposed by the government of being entirely independent of the religious sentiments, turns out to be a purport as there was nothing so significant to ban the sale of beef and the slaughter of cows, beef in fact was one of the highest exported commodities of India to the world along with cow skin. Also, surprisingly, the slaughter of buffaloes, which is an integral part of many Hindu rites and rituals, has not been touched.
Talking of the recent appointment of G.Chauhan as the head of the FTII, Mukesh “Shaktimaan” Khanna, who cannot even pronounce the name of the country’s most acclaimed documentary filmmaker on NDTV, as the head of CFS are glaring examples of the BJP’s heretical wish to saffronize the various offices of the country. Even the Film censor board, the premier certification board for Indian films, has not been left untouched, where the government has appointed an unrecognised personality like P.Nihalani as the head, who’s only known credential is that he directed the election video for Modi. The ban put on the Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle on the insistence of the MHRD and the thorns laid out in the path of Greenpeace India lays a proof before the countrymen of the government’s efforts to suffocate the democratic forces of the country.
One year of the present rightist government has elapsed, and we have got false claims of bringing black money back , we have got a neo-liberal agenda like “Swachch Bharat” and we also have had the Modi Gate controversy in which the government stood in ‘shameless’ solidarity with its MP, Sushma Swaraj. The Vyapam scam and the refusal to resign by the CM of the state of Madhya Pradesh, has also brought to the fore the lust for power that the MPs of the fascists in power have.
Science and defence are the two worst affected areas during the past year. The CSIR and the ARSI remain without heads, while the 2014 appointed army personnel remain unpaid till now. Even the researchers have been forced to protest against the stagnant budget allocated to them. The Rural employment scheme and the matrimonial welfare scheme have faced massive slashes in budgetary allocation, and this has happened within a year of Modi’s electoral speech in which he called himself a “shramik” and attached huge importance to matrimonial care. Not only these two, there have been major slashes in the budgetary allocation of almost every single sector in the country.
Violence against the minorities are also on the rise, and with the support from the centre, heinous forces like the VHP and the Bajrang Dal have been conducting heighteous campaigns to advertise their Hindutwa campaign among the masses. The church demolition in Hissar or the Atali massacre, all happening within the states led by the BJP, are proofs of the centre’s blind eye to these forces, which have been found conducting membership drives and campaigns in those areas prior to the massacres . The incidents of violence against the Dalits have also been overlooked and are examples of the major loopholes that the functioning of the government has when the violence includes the demolition of minorities’ lives and monuments.
But, amidst all these too, the work being carried out by the democratic and secular forces of the nation has been a ray of hope within the dark days of fascism that the country is experiencing ,where the minorities are being treated with disdain and the public sector stakes are being sold to the agents of imperialism. Following the sale of stakes, there has been a drop for a year in the employment of the government services which has disrupted the career plans of many aspiring students and working professionals. The left organisations and at times, the civil movement groups have been carrying out a historic task, a task which has been entrusted on them by the great mass of humanity, which has been taunted by the hackles put on it by the majoritarian forces in the country.
The right wing forces need to understand that, since the ancient days, India has been a country which has not shown an averse attitude towards diversity like many other counterparts, but rather, it has opened its wide arms to different schools of thoughts and personalities and regimes, so the very attitude of putting India on the path of attaining a Hindu State is against the basic idea of “Unity In Diversity” that India celebrates in its daily life. The heinous drive to satisfy the upper class and the majority by the Narendra Modi government at the centre needs to stop.
The Modi government, in the one year that it has been at the centre has amended the labour laws to such an extent that even after apprenticing, a labour does not have the guarantee of job nor does he control the work hours. The extremely small scale industries too now have to pay revenue to the government while the farmers have been forced to commit suicides in the growth of foreign goods available at cheaper prices than the local ones. The government says it has a dearth of funds but it can sanction more than crore of rupees for the construction of a statue of Sardar Patel. Though, we do not oppose the construction of statue of such a great freedom fighter, but the hypocrisy regarding the shortage of funds needs to be addressed urgently.
The Hashimpura verdict too, has been a sham on the face of the government which lays its utmost importance on the “ease of business”. The “Make In India” programme of the government cannot be successful unless there is a marked increase in the number of local entrepreneurs, which seems like a distant dream with the economic condition put on us by the increase in the various taxes, because we cannot forget, the most populous class in the country today is the middle class, and it avoids risks. Such decisions bring out the myopic view of the government in terms of national growth and critical thinking.
The BJP’s and in a sense even the Congress’s true characteristic came out with the FDI debate. It was a matter worth mentioning that when the congress was in power, it the BJP who opposed the bill along with the left, and now when the BJP is in power, it is the congress opposing it along with the left. The only constant factor in the opposition is the left, which has since time immemorial held out its solemn resistance to FDI. The BJP has been successful in invoking FDI in the defence sector along with certain others too, which will show its effect in the times to come.
Modi’s foreign visits have also come into questioning; the speeches delivered by the PM have been at times controversial and hurting to the citizens as for example the “ashamed to be Indians” incident. The feminists too have taken guard with PM’s speech in Bangladesh vocally praising the work done by his Bangladeshi counterpart stressing on the part ‘even after being a women’. His speeches at times even contained shallow thoughts regarding the molestation of women, when he advised the women to take rape and molestation ‘sportingly’.
All these and many more, have caused the people of India to take a revisionary look into who they have elected for running the country. Even the citizens of a tiny town like mine, Silchar in Assam, are found cursing the elected BJP municipality chairman, Nihar Thakur, when the street lights do not light up during the night, the drains remain unattended to during rains and the garbage dumps remain unheeded to for days. The intention to mention this fact is to bring out the strange coincidental similarity of crushing the public’s expectations that the BJP personnel have, may it be for the entire India or for a tiny town in the far east of the nation.
