Skip to main content

Not in my name




The various demonstrations that took the country by surprise yesterday show that India is not lost yet.  People gathered in thousands in various places to show their protest against the attacks on people belonging to a particular religious community.  From the time Mr Modi came to power in Delhi, certain criminal groups emerged under the banner of right wing religious activism and attacked certain sections of people.  Unfortunately the Prime Minister never condemned any of those attacks.  It appeared that the attacks had his tacit blessings.  It also came to light that the BJP and its allies are spending huge sums of money on spreading malicious information on social networks.  Those states ruled by BJP are changing the history textbooks in order to present the new generation with distorted histories.  In short, falsehood and hatred were being foisted on the nation very liberally.  It was an alarming situation.

The latest protest in the form of #NotInMyName gives hope to the nation.  If the people refuse to accept falsehood and hatred, no one can foist it on them.  India deserves a far better government than one which insists on selling balderdash to the people. Let movements such as #NotInMyName rise and spread throughout the country so that the 2019 general elections will teach the right lessons to our politicians (most of whom are hard-core criminals). 

The BJP’s contribution to the nation has been a neurosis.  The party took the nation from one stereotype to another, one contradiction to the next, one paranoia to another, never achieving anything beautiful, elegant, vibrant and swinging.  So much rubbish was heaped on the collective psyche of the nation.  As a result, certain animals became more sacred than certain human beings.  Human minds became polluted with filth that was given religious colouring. 

Let that change.  Let the Prime Minister and his teams learn that Indians still value life and its beautiful forms such as harmony and creativity.

Comments

  1. Yes such movements are a need of the hour, when elections are not that far away. But, I am telling you now, two years from now we will see the biggest mockery of elections ever happened on this soil.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's something I fear too. The way things are going, it is more likely that the elections will be rigged heavily. But the people have so little choice. There is no viable alternative to the BJP and the party is really taking advantage of the situation. What a pathetic situation in a country of 1.3 billion people!

      Delete
  2. I still very much believe in the subversive potential of Soial Movements and critical Civil Societies, not of course, those constructed and stage-manged by the State and the Market. As David Harvey, the Marxist,Human Geographer envisioned, " There should evolve Little Pockets of Resistance."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No doubt movements like #NotInMyName have a tremendous subversive potential. But strong leadership is what's missing.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 2

Fort Kochi’s water metro service welcomes you in many languages. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is one of the first. The above photo I took shows only just a few of the many languages which are there on a series of boards. Kochi welcomes everyone. It welcomed the Arabs long before Prophet Muhammad received his divine inspiration and gave the people a single God in the place of the many they worshipped. Those Arabs made their journey to Kerala for trade. There are plenty of Muslims now in Fort Kochi. Trade brought the Chinese too later in the 14 th -15 th centuries. The Chinese fishing nets that welcome you gloriously to Fort Kochi are the lingering signs of the island’s Chinese links. The reason that brought the Portuguese another century later was no different. Then came the Dutch followed by the British. All for trade. It is interesting that when the northern parts of India were overrun by marauders, Kerala was embracing ‘globalisation’ through trades with many countries. Babu...