Cast a glance at the socio-political ambience of the country, and you will come back uttering: chaotic, undemocratic, inhuman. It is like “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,” as the English poet W.B. Yeats would sing. The situation has come to such a sorry pass that there is no peace, no smooth functioning of any institution, no sense of inclusivity, no fair practice of politics, no or little hope for justice, no one to stop a person from committing a crime, hardly anyone to raise voice against the ongoing attacks on the rights of minorities, especially the Muslims who form the second largest majority in the country.
To gauge the extent of rot that has plagued our entire system, see the saga of July 2 when some media outlets and news agencies had already “reported” a Delhi court decision on the bail plea of AltNews fact-checker and co-founder Mohammed Zubair hours before Chief Metropolitan Magistrate at Patiala House Court, Snigdha Sarvaria actually pronounced her order.
We have fought to liberate the country from the shackles of slavery, we have a democratic setup, we have a Constitution. Then, how did it come to this?
This is the result of willing suspension of truth and justice, of giving hatemongering quite a long leash, of letting lawlessness go on, of looking the other way while human and fundamental rights of a person is violated at one’s whims, of keeping stoic silence on the wrongs being done, of shielding a culprit on he-or-she-is-our-own ground, of practising double standard when the question of giving justice to victims of hatemongering or maintaining law and order comes to the fore; of thrusting a particular ideology into the pluralistic, multireligious, multicultural polity by employing brute force, and so on. In one term, it is the natural corollary of practising hate politics.
Hate politics is detrimental to the very idea of India, to the very concept of democracy, to the very spirit of the Constitution, and of course to the very principles of progress and development that the powers-that-be do not get tired to swear by. This hate juggernaut is eating into the polity as termites destroy wood and make it worthless. It would not only ultimately weaken the nation from within but tarnish her fair name in the comity of nations, a glimpse of which we have seen recently when the entire Gulf nations sharply reacted to the Nupur Sharma’s blasphemous remarks. And even the Supreme Court of India held this BJP leader as the only person responsible for what is happening in the country and wondered why the authorities have not arrested her yet.
The situation demands that the conscientious citizens remain live to the day-to-day happenings and make tireless strivings to contain the rising pace of hate politics and thus save the nation from falling into the fire of hatred.
