When Congress leader Jairam Ramesh mentioned Narendra Modi following DDLJ, Indians wondered if the Indian prime minister also had to do something with Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol's iconic movie, Dil Wale Dulhaniya Le Jayein Ge. So Ramesh had to clarify to remove confusion.
There is no Bollywood romance or a happy ending, but a deep crisis of governance, lack of accountability or transparency, cutting democratic dissent, intimidation, and manufactured outrage against those who dare to question.
So if you are thinking that, maybe, Pakistan has attacked India, or China has stopped its trade, or the plague that is spreading in Russia has entered India, this article is not about that. It is about the complete collapse of a system and chaos that the country is facing under 'Lashkar-e-Modi'. Rather than resolving the grievances of its citizens, the government accused opposition and the protesting students of embarrassing India and creating anarchy, and alleged it is a regime change operation.
So the message is clear: dissent is not simply a democratic right but is a threat to national stability. When did raising voice against the ills of the country become equivalent to conspiring against the country?
But the Modi government needs distractions from high unemployment rates in India, corruption, rapes, SIR, Manipur, farmers and falling GDP numbers. For months they said that all these protests were foreign-funded and one name was highlighted in media, George Soros, who they alleged was behind it and trying to detabilise India. When things got out of the hand, and the Indians demanded Home Minister Amit Shah's resignation, godi media started taking the name of familiar targets – ISI and Pakistan – because this is never out of fashion in Modi's Bharat today. But blaming Islamabad will not resolve India's internal problems. It just shows BJP's own political insecurity.
The greatest irony: BJP has forgotten that the party itself owes much of its political history to agitation, sit-ins and protests as an opposition party in India. The party was built upon raising voices and challenging the status quo, all used as legitimate instruments of political oppositions. Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, considered to be the ideological founder of BJP, struggled against the British, and then Nehru, before starting a political agitation over IIOJ&K.
So imagine if Dr Mukherjee or former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee were alive today, would they also be called 'urban Naxals', or accused of spreading anarchy in the country? Vajpayee reached the parliament in a bullock cart to protest against rising petrol prices in Indira Gandhi government but no one called him a CIA-funded agent. In 1976, Modi, during India's first emergency, used to send messages to the students, urging them to take to streets 'to save democracy'. If public protest was a patriotic duty, then why is it portrayed as dangerous disorder under Modi?
The Modi government should be working on these troubling indicators, as they deserve a greater scrutiny:
Per India's National Crime Records Bureau, the national rape rate is 4.4 per 100,000 women, and 31,500 rape cases are registered annually. The Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao campaign is just a slogan. India's jobless rate is closer to 10% but official figures say it is 3.2%. According to experts, 62.3% of workers are underemployed and stuck in low-paying work.
Another lie: India's GDP growth rate is 7.7%-7.8%. But economists like Professor Arun Kumar and former finance secretary Subhash Chandra Garg question whether the numbers reflect ground realities. In fact, alternative calculations put the actual growth rate closer to 2.6%.
The total crime rate in India stands at 418.9 per 100,000, and the country ranks 21st in Asia on the Global Organized Crime Index with a 5.9 criminality score, driven primarily by human trafficking, drug transit and cybercrime.
So if after 12 years of rule, Modi still has to blame Pakistan, or Soros, it is irrelevant who is protesting against him, because he still needs someone else to blame.
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