All hail Modi, Hindustan has woken up
Hindi hai hum watan hain, Hindustan hamara!
Why is everybody blaming the BJP and the RSS and the Sangh Parivar for the evil that lurks in the minds of men - and women - for the malevolence that beats at the heart of society?
All the rumours and the Muzzafarnagars and the Kairanas and saving the cow and killing Akhlaq and everything else in between and beyond is possible, because there is distrust, latent in the fabric of Indian society.
People desperately want to believe in the concept of the "other" - the unclean, the ungodly, the heathen, the different, the "mleccha", the sudra, the non-believer, the kaffir... the aberration. It is only in this belief can we find a meaning to our derisory existence, it is by denigrating the neighbour can we feel superior.
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| Now, finally, there is pride in declaring our true selves. |
It is no longer a question of restraint, the hypocrisy that guided India through the first six decades of independence has shed its unnecessary veneer of being holier-than-thou.
The belief in secularity; the love of diversity; the unity of disparity has all been shown up for the sham it was. The pressure of wanting to believe in something that went against communal wisdom distilled over centuries of disbelief has been removed from the shoulders of India.
Today the majority can stand tall and spout what their parents and grandparents took great pains to sheath in the coldest chambers of their consciousness. The beast that had to hide in those dark corners is raging and stampeding and finding its power with each passing day.
Now, finally, there is pride in declaring our true selves. India has come out of the closet that had been defined by narrow-minded, pretentious thinkers who strayed from the true will of the people and thought themselves to be morally superior to the hordes beneath.
Some of them had the impudence to write down their misbegotten beliefs and enshrine it in a book of codes that they then made the country swear allegiance to. By this book was a great farce played out, drawing a silken mesh in hallowed white, over the real Indian.
It is not that the curtain of pretence never did part and the dark interior exposed, but greater was the force of hypocrisy that managed to draw it back.
No longer is the curtain in place because a maturing nation has probably realised that it is much better to live with purported evil than with the untruth of make-believe purity.
What lay hidden in the deepest recesses of society is out in the open.
What families discussed in the privacy of their bed chambers can today be debated in the tea stalls of unpaved by-lanes where cell phones and mobile devices seamlessly connect to the furthest reaches of humanity.
What elders would comment on in unguarded moments of rare lucidity can today be spouted from stages of brick and mortar or broadcast over the air waves with equal aplomb.
It is wrong to blame the Sangh Parivar for showing up Bharat for what it is, it is highly misplaced to target the BJP's tallest leader ever and the prime minister of India for letting ferment a state of distrust and divide because it is not they who have done anything, for it is our pedigree.
Like the gene carries information across biological generations, so have we carried the burden of our non-assimilative predecessors. From generation through generation, people of this overpopulated dusty sub-continent, continued to hold firm to ideas of separation and superiority and alienation.
We never believed that we were one and equal; we never liked those who were different; we bowed when we were cowed; we always hated every other religion from the bottom of our hearts, and given a chance to speak our minds without fear we would do so.
Today that chance has come; and if there is anything that the BJP and the Sangh Parivar can be blamed for, it is only this that they have given India: the liberty to be... to be who true Indians want it to be, to be who our forefathers would have wanted us to be.
Today, we have risen above the self-effacing poverty of non-descriptive existence; we have become the proud chest-thumping protectors of our derivation. All hail Narendra Modi and his ilk for having granted his "bhaiyos and bhenos" that unique opportunity to be themselves.
And anyone having any other opinion is free to leave... forever!