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| From Indian Express |
There
is no way to rule innocent people, as Ayn Rand said. How do you put any sort
of control on innocent people? And ruling is all about putting controls, isn’t
it? “The only power any government has
is the power to crack down on criminals,” said Rand. If there aren’t enough
criminals, the government will make them. You declare more and more things as illegal
and then it becomes impossible for people to live without breaking laws.
From the time the Modi government came to
power in 2014 an endless list of laws has been implemented. A facile taxing system
called GST, Real Estate Regulation Act, laws for recovery of debt, insolvency
and bankruptcy, linking almost everything under the sun with Aadhar… It’s a
formidable list. Then there are the unwritten rules implemented by all sorts of
volunteers like the various Senas: what food you can eat and cannot eat, what
dress you may wear, who you can marry, which god you can worship, in which
language you should give interviews and write exams…
Modi’s party leaders are now clamouring for
rewriting the Constitution of the country. They want to make more things
illegal for certain sections of the country’s population. Will the country have
enough jails to hold all the new criminals who will be created by the new
Constitution?
Personally, I would have loved to live a
life far away from politics and politicians. In the pre-Modi era, it was not
impossible to retain your innocence by choosing to stay away from politics and
living your life as privately as possible. Yes, there was a lot of corruption.
You had to bribe almost everybody on the way in order to get things done particularly
in government offices. Corruption has not become any less now and, worse, a lot
more things have become difficult. Survival itself has become difficult with
prices of almost everything rising day after day. Our farmers have chosen to
throw their produces on the road in despair. Many of us will soon be forced to
throw ourselves on the road in utter dejection.
The greatest tragedy is that you can’t even
choose to live in the privacy of your home and workplace retaining your sanity
and innocence. The government has entered everywhere under the guise of
cleaning up public life. Maybe, this
is cleaning up: letting people perish.
Innocence is dead. You have to break laws if
you want to survive. Otherwise get ready to throw yourself on the road.
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