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A Democracy with too many secrets.


I wouldn’t be surprised when Orwell’s 1984 is banned, considering the fact that the nation is now run by a Hinduvta government, and its performance is evaluated by the so-called intelligentsia who Arnab Goswami easily manipulates in his Times Now’s courtroom. I am reminded of the time when a Kerala consumer court had issued an arrest warrant against RIL’s god and the editor there went ballistic for doing the forbidden of touching his master’s pal. We were chided, and we swallowed it and went home telling ourselves we were working for a newspaper which is considered to represent the conscience of the nation. This is one reason why I suggest you sit with someone who has been involved in editorial decision-making to find out what’s wrong with India, the democracy with too many unspoken rules and secrets.

With regards to ‘my pals’, this platform is an open one, and I don’t discuss family and seek no bonhomie with anyone, and I don’t do convenient friendship, and thus my relation with people has always been ambivalent. I love it since it defines the unacademic me. I am a writer, and I need no certification to prove what I already know too well. To understand AFSPA’s cruelness, you don’t have to be a Havard professor who has been interviewed by the top news channels in the world; to get what the widows of fake encounter victims go through, you don’t have to be an Oxford-certified scholar who has crossed oceans; and to find out why the Reddy commission’s suggestion was struck down and why the J&K resolution to repeal AFSPA was sabotaged, you don’t have to be one of the best visible faces in the country.

When you say that we are not serious and we haven’t done enough to fight for ourselves then what about Sharmila Irom, what about Nameirakpam Bisheshwar? And if you don’t understand the ill-intention of the system, try to find out who had worked with NSCN(IM) against others, and why didn’t the Indian army, who could go into any place with the best reliable report in any corner of Kangleipak, intervene when NSCN(IM) went slaughtering hundreds of innocent people? Where were they? Where were they when our supply lines were cut off for three months? And when hundreds were being killed, did the Indian media bother to dedicate even one inch-column to report? When did they start reporting on NE issues?

It does make sense for you to be disgusted when you see frail whining members of your family after you have established a life elsewhere. It’s human nature; we want our kind to be just like that the well-scrubbed lots, and in that you feel either contempt or empathy. But why does it have to be that speaking out against the nefarious conducts of a supposedly legitimate state should be construed as the conducts equivalent of Al-Qaeda? Can a democracy not tolerate it and rethink its policies? A great nation should admit its wrongdoings, and a bold nation shouldn’t have any problem in apologizing for it errors. Does it have to be that we simply sit back and receive the blows? No, we don’t have to, I will stand up and fight, and I won’t show respect for a system that has been persecuting and humiliating us for generations? I want it to repent, for I feel that it should place itself above the armed thugs. If it doesn't , then it is my natural right to continue writing against, nor rant, for it for the psychopaths, it to remind them that someday they should be on their knees to ask for our forgiveness, perhaps then we can coexist.

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