Mathew John 
This is not a Kafkaesque fantasy but is happening in Modi’s India, once the hallowed land of the Mahatma but today a cesspool of crime, bigotry and injustice. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court granted bail to former Nagpur University professor Shoma Sen who had been arrested in 2018 and charged under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) in connection with the Elgar Parishad case which, according to the National Investigation Association (NIA)’s tinkered narrative, was a Communist Party of India (Maoist) conspiracy “to violently overthrow democracy and the state” with intent to strike terror using explosive devices.
But the truth behind the drummed up conspiracy and motives is that she has been behind bars for six years because of the simple, human act of speaking out against casteism, communalism and atrocities against Dalits. In a country with a plethora of laws but little justice, she remains an accused, granted bail, with the most stringent conditions that include surrender of her passport and reporting to the local SHO every fortnight.
To jog the notoriously short public memory, the Elgar Parishad gathering of December 2017, organised by Justices P.B. Sawant and B.G. Kolse-Patil along with non-profit organisations, was enhanced by the presence of our most committed social activists who have spent a lifetime working among the poor and dispossessed. The event not only commemorated the 200th anniversary of the battle of Koregaon Bhima but sounded a clarion call for the annihilation of caste, communalism and Hindutva. Elgar Parishad represented a frontal assault on the core ideology of this regime, whose asymmetrical response betrayed its determination to teach these upstarts a lesson they would never forget, going to the extent of fabricating evidence through inserting counterfeit messages into their email accounts.
The unforgettable retribution was the result of daring to confront a cultural fault line in which inequality has been formalised, even ritualised, and where religion is used to instigate hate. In our surreal world, those demanding enforcement of our sacred constitutional commitments to banish inequality, casteism and communalism are being hounded as terrorists by those seeking an unequal majoritarian identity for the country. Among the alleged terrorists of the Elgar Parishad event was the gentle 84-year-old Jesuit activist Stan Swamy whose repeated requests for medical bail were rejected. He died in jail on July 5, 2021.
Speaking truth to power is an unforgivable crime today. I can recount names of some of the victims of our kangaroo courts that target anyone who gets into the crosshairs of this tyrannical regime. Siddique Kappen, the journalist who spent almost three years in jail under UAPA and PMLA for his links with the PFI, accused of “only reporting on Muslims” and “reporting on communal riots” – crimes for which he has been charged with sedition and promoting enmity. Disha Ravi, the climate activist who was arrested for conspiring with Greta Thunberg to “wage economic, social, cultural war and spread disaffection against the Indian State.”
There’s the case of the 90% disabled professor G.N. Saibaba who spent almost 10 years in jail, mostly in solitary confinement, for having “Maoist links”. A victim of the merciless brutality of our justice system, he was finally acquitted by the Bombay high court in March 2024. Saibaba’s case showcased the venality of our Supreme Court and its complicity with this regime. In a hurriedly convened special hearing on October 14, 2022, a Saturday, the bench of M.R. Shah and Bela Trivedi suspended the Bombay high court’s order discharging Saibaba, directing the lower court to pass a fresh judgement on merits. Fortunately for Saibaba, the high court stuck to its guns, reiterating that there was nothing to link the accused with any terrorist act.
The roll call of the unjustly damned – Umar Khalid, Sanjiv Bhatt and many others – is unending.
But there is no public outrage. My generation of midnight’s children were brought up on the drivel that we are a tolerant, caring people, but that’s a myth and a delusion that have been truly “interred with their bones” in the last decade. We are arguably the most selfish people on earth. In a recent piece, when I posited the view that the Lok Sabha election was a fight to “win back the nation’s soul”, a dear friend responded angrily by asking, “Nation’s soul, my foot! Does it exist?” He followed it up with an Urdu couplet, which I have imperfectly translated: “Our riches of poison are overflowing; poison bathes poison everywhere!”
The leader sets the tone for the country. Modi’s India is defined by that crude bully boy slogan: “Ghar mein ghus kar maaroonga!” We cringe before China’s might which is stomping all over our territory and lump it even where Maldives is concerned but are quick to flex a bloated 56-inch chest when dealing with Pakistan. At home, our tinpot dictator watches from afar, the interminable civil war in Manipur. The fake swagger is all too obvious.
Our dysfunctional and emotionally challenged society has lost the capacity for empathy and compassion. Kindliness and decency are seen as symptoms of weakness. We have been hollowed out as a society, no longer even a pale imitation of the humane, secular Republic conceived by our founding fathers. The social ostracism and cultural erasure of Muslims is now state policy. With his recent obnoxious comments on Muslims as infiltrators and stereotyping them as “those who have more children”, Modi has clearly decided that targeting Muslims and keeping the communal pot boiling is the way to win the hearts of the majority. Sadly, his pure malevolence and menacing majoritarianism appeal to many among us.
The Mahatma’s land is now the most hate-filled, violent society on earth. The social ecosystem is steaming with schismatic tensions and ubiquitous daily cruelty – lynchings, ghar wapsi, anti-Romeo squads, beef vigilantism and the rhetoric of pure hate spearheaded by the prime minister of the country. It’s open season for thoki raj and bulldozer justice. An explicit anti-Muslim bias provides the ideological underpinning for state policy. As an electoral stratagem, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act has been exhumed with the mischievous intent of persecuting Muslims, even those who are Indian but have no documentary proof of birth and citizenship.
Such brazen iniquity would be unthinkable in a country committed to liberty, equality and fraternity but it would appear that a section of our countrymen endorses the mischievous heresy that we are better off without democracy. According to a 2023 PEW survey, 85% of the respondents believed that military rule or rule by an authoritarian leader was good for the country. The same outfit that describes itself as a non-partisan fact tank had, in August 2023, arrived at the conclusion that about eight in ten Indians have a favourable view of Modi, although incongruously, his party has never garnered more than 37% of the popular vote. It’s hardly a surprise that the figures churned out by these statistical jugglers rate low on the scale of truth. As writer Mark Twain observed: “There are lies, damned lies and statistics!”
Writer Agatha Christie had sagely observed that sweeping generalisations are seldom if ever true and are usually utterly inaccurate. So let me be specific about whom I mean when I refer to the icy hardness of heart of our people. I have in mind those very guys who told PEW research that India needed an authoritarian leader for its own good – the despicable middle class and our pragmatic, self-serving corporates and celebrities. Unsurprisingly, Erich Fromm, in his diagnosis of the psychology of Nazism had similarly identified the German middle class of shopkeepers and white-collar workers along with the industrialists and aristocracy as the groups fanatically attracted to the fascist ideology. The apathy, the heartlessness and self-absorption of the smug middle class and the rich and privileged have been a consistent feature throughout history.
These apologists for authoritarianism call to mind the characters in a recent Holocaust film based on a surreal Martin Amis novel about human depravity titled The Zone of Interest. The story revolves around the idyllic life of the family of a German commander at a concentration camp in Auschwitz. They live a dreamlike existence amidst the horrors (unseen and yet palpable in the background) of the concentration camp next door. Everything about their life – from the toys the kids play with to the cutlery used to eat food – comes from pillaging the belongings of the victims. What chills one to the bone is the casual apathy and insensitivity of these ordinary people to the hideous barbarity happening at touching distance. Even more horrifying is their fervour to protect their macabre world built on pure evil.
The stony-hearted supporters of Modi’s authoritarianism would, like it or not, identify with the characters in the film. As for the rest of us, we must guard against what became of the Germans under Hitler. In the book, Amis describes their debasement thus: “But Germans had already got used to living without honour – and without justice, freedom, truth and reason.”
We can avoid the dishonourable fate of the Germans only by standing up and fighting to restore our democracy.
Mathew John is a former civil servant. The views are personal.