Puzzles, puzzles all the way

I’m now living in a country that should rightfully belong to Shakespeare’s witches who declared, “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” Good people go to prison and bad people to the parliament.

Narendra Modi’s acquittal by no less than the Supreme Court in the 2002 Gujarat riot cases did not surprise me. I ceased to expect justice in this country a couple of years back. But I had not anticipated the arrest of Teesta Setalvad along with R B Sreekumar to instantly follow Modi’s acquittal. Even in the world of Shakespeare’s witches, vengeance wasn’t so instantaneous.

I should have known better. My own ignorance puzzles me more than that of my compatriots who hailed the apex court’s verdict. Are they really ignorant about Rana Ayyub’s Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up and/or Manoj Mitra’s Fiction of Fact-Finding: Modi and Godhra and/or Gujarat: Behind the Curtain by R B Sreekumar and/or Teesta Setalvad’s Foot Soldier of the Constitution? Most of them may not have read the books but they are aware of the facts documented in them, surely. If not, that ignorance does puzzle me.

In other words, why do too many Indians choose to be ignorant or choose falsehood consciously? I can understand a few thousand people embracing falsehood for various motives. But when millions choose to wallow in slush with porcine merriment, I am more than puzzled.

Should I really be puzzled, however? Wasn’t it a court of justice that offered Socrates the chalice of hemlock? Wasn’t it another court of justice that nailed Jesus to his cross? What would have the Supreme Court of India done to the killer of Mahatma Gandhi today?

Courts of justice have never ceased to puzzle me.

Nevertheless, I seem to be living on an alien planet now. In a homeland that I don’t understand anymore.

It’s a place where they say the cow is holy and then they let lakhs of cows starve on streets and highways. They say the Ganga is holy and that remains the filthiest river in the world with 3 million litres of sewage emptied into it every day besides the microplastics dumped into its waters from the holy cities of Varanasi and Haridwar as part of religious rituals. They say that India ranks at 101 out of 106 nations on the Global Hunger Index though the Forbes List has nearly 200 billionaires from India.

What am I to expect anymore? Is there room for hope in my lifetime?

The latest issue of a Malayalam weekly (Mathrubhumi) which enjoys a high circulation in Kerala carries an interview with R B Sreekumar. The exceptionally long interview was taken just before Sreekumar’s arrest. One of the many puzzling things that the top police officer says is that it was “innocent Muslims who became victims of the Gujarat riots. Not one Muslim goon was killed. The whole Muslim underworld was with BJP.”

The Muslims who beheaded Nupur Sharma’s supporter in Udaipur were also BJP men!

My puzzlement reaches its inevitable orgasm. What exactly does my government seek? 

Image from Twitter

PS. This is written for Blogchatter’s Blog Hop: 4 things about today’s world that puzzle you.

My previous post in this series: Happy Days of Long Ago