When your law failed to arrest the air…

Instead of banning the links of a documentary, which you call a propaganda piece, through Twitter and YouTube, how about banning mobile phones and laptops? What a pity! Your god whom you hail ‘Hara Hara Mahadev’ has not come to your rescue with his trident to stab and break the monitors of countless glowing mobile phones and laptops. Nor has your Bharat Mata tried to cover your real face, though you hail her 'Bharat Mataki Jai’ numerous times. 

You ordered the university administrations to cut the power and prevent students from screening the documentary that reveals your original face. But you could not keep the batteries of their mobile phones and laptops hungry. They can get them recharged somewhere and see your silence when thousands were killed in the riots you let loose in your state. You must have planned something more effectively. Instead of deleting the links to the documentary, you should have ordered the university authorities to remove the batteries from the mobile phones and laptops of the students. Even if you did so, the students of your ‘new India’ would buy the batteries again and bring the real you back. 

On a day when you scrapped Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which provided special status to Jammu and Kashmir, you cut off communication and left the people devoid of internet and mobile phone services. You arrested a protestor and tortured him. You placed a public address system near him in the lockup and broadcast his cries of pain to the village in the valley, and intimidated the people into accepting your amendment.

Then, you provided citizenship to the “Indians” migrating from the neighboring countries. When you don’t say who those ‘Indians’ are, we could find who they are and who they are not. Receiving a rousing approval, when you cry aloud on the dais ‘No Indian citizen will be left out’ in the National Register of Citizenship, we know whom you leave out. To put it in author Arundhati Roy’s words in the documentary, 

“It is in this country where refugees are manufactured from its population”. 

The register put a poor rickshaw driver Nur Hussain, his wife Sahera Begum, and their two children as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh for eighteen months in prison until some human rights lawyers represented their case and questioned the validity of the investigation. Though the court, at last, declared them ‘Indians', tens of thousands of such Muslims in Assam are still fighting for citizenship. 

It is here in your 'New India' a 23-year-old Muslim youth Faizan was tortured and beaten to death by the police in the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act. His mother is still awaiting justice and trying to find the policeman who killed her son. And it is here the police force the Muslim youth to sing the national anthem and give blows to them. They did sing the anthem, but Rabindranath Tagore moaned in pain when the cops beat them up with their latis at a corner of a road in New Delhi. 

In an earlier interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, you say that the Britishers should not talk about human rights as you imply that they exploited India when it was their colony. The documentary reveals what you sowed for reaping victories of power in India. But, according to you, the film seems to cast apprehensions about the authority and credibility of the Supreme Court. Of course, your charge is correct. Because you need to be thankful to the court that cleared you of all the accusations regarding the Gujarat riots.

With an angry look, you say to the BBC reporter:

'The one area where I was weak was how to handle the media'. 

What you said has become true now. If not, can you smile and show your real face in the glowing smartphones today? 

‘Hara Hara Mahadev’