Skip to main content

Will saffron continue to darken India?

 


Five states are going to the polls next month and four of them are being ruled by the saffron party. Will saffron continue to cast its dark shadows there?

If the voters go by reason rather than by religious sentiments, the BJP will not have a cat in hell’s chance of winning. But do voters ever go by reason, especially in a state like UP? Already hate speeches are flowing like venomous rivers in that state. And most of the speakers are ‘holy’ people! Let us not forget that the massive victory of the BJP in the 2014 general elections was preceded by a murderous communal riot in UP’s Muzaffarpur. Now the BJP is trying to do the same thing all over again. There have been open calls for genocide against Muslims from BJP leaders and others like sadhus. Repressive measures are being taken against minority institutions like those of the Missionaries of Charity. A lot of Christian churches and schools were attacked recently in many North Indian states.

When you have nothing to show for progress and development, bring in communal hatred and violence. Modi has done this again and again, right from the post-Godhra days in Gujarat.

What a pathetic governance has it been after those events in Gujarat which made Modi the Hindu Hriday Samrat!


One lakh farmers committed suicide during Modi’s reign, from 2014-2021. Lakhs of Adivasi and Dalit children die due to poverty and malnutrition in Modi’s India. There is severe unemployment. There are serious economic problems in every state. The prices of essential commodities keep rising day by day and the government doesn’t seem to give two hoots. Yes, the PM cares for one particular group of people: the corporate sector. Their loans amounting to a whopping Rs 10.72 lakh crore was written off. When the poor farmers demanded the waiving of their meagre loans, Modi said there was no money for that.

Modi has no money for the poor. He has money, thousands of crores, to advertise himself, to go on foreign tours, to refurbish his wardrobe, to build a splendorous palace for himself in Delhi…

The people of Punjab are not likely to vote for Modi’s party in the coming election there. They did not even allow Modi to move on their road. More informed people say that Modi did not want to move and the alleged threat to his life was only sheer drama. The actual reason was that only 3,000 people were attending the meeting for which 70,000 chairs had been arranged. Punjab has rejected Modi, in other words.

Will UP vote for him? Well, possibly yes. That’s a state where religious frenzy decides too many things. But the western UP’s farmers are not likely to vote for Modi. And that region has as many as 135 seats. And then there is the Akhilesh Yadav factor which cannot be ignored. He seems to be offering better things to the people of UP than dead bodies floating in the Ganga and children dying in hospitals.

I’d certainly love to see Goa, Manipur and Uttarakhand exhibiting more sense than UP.

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanJanuary 28, 2022 at 6:35 PM

    Hari OM
    Politics... another name for a minfield... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. magiceyeJanuary 28, 2022 at 6:38 PM

    Fear the worst and hope for the best.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Pooja MahimkarJanuary 30, 2022 at 10:18 AM

    I believe sense would prevail now. Other than their strong hold state, other states would give them a tough time

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 30, 2022 at 11:50 AM

      I too hope fervently that the voters make use of their brains this time for a change.

      Delete
  4. parwatisingariFebruary 1, 2022 at 9:24 AM

    haa! politics the final refuge of the thieves.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Chitrakoot: Antithesis of Ayodhya

Illustration by MS Copilot Designer Chitrakoot is all that Ayodhya is not. It is the land of serenity and spiritual bliss. Here there is no hankering after luxury and worldly delights. Memory and desire don’t intertwine here producing sorrow after sorrow. Situated in a dense forest, Chitrakoot is an abode of simplicity and austerity. Ayodhya’s composite hungers have no place here. Let Ayodhya keep its opulence and splendour, its ambitions and dreams. And its sorrows as well. Chitrakoot is a place for saints like Atri and Anasuya. Atri is one of the Saptarishis and a Manasputra of Brahma. Brahma created the Saptarishis through his mind to help maintain cosmic order and spread wisdom. Anasuya is his wife, one of the most chaste and virtuous women in Hindu mythology. Her virtues were so powerful that she could transmute the great Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva into infants when they came to test her chastity. Chitrakoot is the place where asceticism towers above even divinit...
22 comments
Read more