Modi's Ecosystem Had Mistaken a Terrified Silence for Peace

A well-known parable tells of a man who approached the Buddha and hurled a barrage of insults at him. The Buddha listened in silence, smiling gently. Frustrated by the lack of reaction, the abuser demanded to know why his vitriol had failed to provoke a response. The Buddha replied: “If I choose not to accept your gift of abuse, to whom does it belong?” The moral is clear: on an individual level, we hold the power to render an insult impotent by simply refusing to internalise it.

Narendra Modi, however, is no Buddha. In his politics, a healthy dose of personal indignation and fierce rhetoric is to be expected. What is far less acceptable is his self-righteousness and moral grandstanding.

The protestors at Jantar Mantar, and across the country, are the primary casualties of this unforgiving ecosystem with Modi as the central symbol. It has deeply fractured the public psyche. As the political scientist Suhas Palshikar has observed, this environment has stripped the youth of hope, rendering their aspirations seemingly meaningless. The reality has become starkly Kafkaesque; much like the faceless, unyielding bureaucracy in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, the current state machinery remains entirely disconnected from the moral realities of its citizens. The resulting lack of institutional accountability does not deter dissent or rehabilitate the public; instead, it inflicts a state of profound psychological exhaustion.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

This leadership nurtures an ecosystem which operates as a well-oiled machine of institutional indignity, targeting individuals and entire communities with casual cruelty. Opponents are patronisingly dismissed with labels like ‘Pappu’, while women are subjected to deeply misogynistic public barbs – such as the infamous “Rs 50-crore girlfriend” remark or the derogatory framing of a political widow. It aggressively demonises foundational national greats like Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, while reducing the complex identities of the Muslim community to a monolith of “anti-nationals” and “terrorists,” systematically chipping away at their right to religious practice. By deliberately erasing the Mughal dynasty from history syllabi, the state seeks to deprive the country of understanding how a diverse, vast, and multi-religious empire was held together through complex institutional and cultural negotiation – while simultaneously stripping the Muslim community of its rightful sense of historical belonging and pride in the nation.

Yet, the most profound insult to the nation came from Modi himself during his official visits to China and South Korea in May 2015. He claimed that before his arrival in 2014, people “felt ashamed of being born Indian” and routinely wondered “what sin they committed in their last life to be born in India.”

What can one say about a leadership that sincerely believes that insulting its own historical greats, sections of its people, and inventing a mythological past somehow glorifies its present? It perfectly mirrors what Adlai E. Stevenson famously said of Richard Nixon: “The kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree and then mount the stump to make a speech for conservation.”

The current regime believes that public education lies outside its political syllabus. Instead of addressing the systemic rot of recurring paper leaks, unyielding unemployment, and institutional decay, the state treats the rightful aspirations and questioning minds of Gen Z as a mere law-and-order crisis. Parliament’s recent passage of the anti-paper leak bill rests on a comforting but historically flawed assumption: that legal severity is an effective deterrent to crime. Legal deterrents were already firmly in place when these rampant leaks occurred. Given the government’s dubious track record of punishing the truly guilty, this new bill simply adds insult to structural injury.

Ultimately, a truly civilised society is defined not just by its laws, but by its linguistic environment. In the classical tradition of Hindostani tehzeeb, language was a shield of dignity; even insults were delivered elegantly, avoiding humiliation. Within that organic social fabric, common swear words are frequently tossed around without malice, serving ironically as informal badges of endearment and shared intimacy. The current political ecosystem, however, has perverted this dynamic. It weaponises formal language to systematically strip citizens of their dignity, while feigning polite outrage at any retort.

When today’s students lash out, their raw, unpolished words are not an exercise in vulgarity; they are the desperate vocabulary of the dispossessed. It is the language of profound anguish and structural helplessness, spoken by a generation trapped in a Kafkaesque trial. By mistaking their exhaustion for defiance and their cries for sedition, the state does not protect decorum – it merely exposes its own profound moral vacuum. By treating every independent thinker as a traitor and every institutional failure as a foreign conspiracy, the ecosystem may succeed in silencing the room – but it will mistake that heavy, terrified silence for peace. True strength does not lie in a sovereign who demands total submission while crying foul at the first sign of critique. It lies in a system confident enough to listen, secure enough to accept its flaws, and wise enough to know that a nation is built by empowering its citizens, not by insulting them.

Naseeruddin Shah is an actor and Ashok Lal an author and playwright.

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