After the farce, truly, comes the nightmare. Happy New Year, says Amit Sengupta, in the time of gaumutra. Avoid plastic surgeries ..
They are not them; they too are he, him, his own transparent image, the saffron mirror of Hindutva’s basic instinct. He is mum, it seems he is not mum, but he too is them. In silence and image, word and deed, time-past, time-present and time-future, in the ‘idea’ of India. Silence is not golden, always, really, but it speaks, in tacit text, as much in overt belligerence. Have you forgotten the first hate metaphors of the hyperbolic Gujarat poll campaign after the 2002 state-sponsored genocide? “Miya Musharraf and Hum Paanch Hamaare Panchees…” He is mum by choice and by device. And his xenophobic followers are doing exactly what he stands for as a great rabble-rouser ‘live’ on TV and a prophet of ‘Modern, Superpower India’
Your scratch the skin, and the legendary beauty of the hydra-headed saffron Octopus is more than skin-deep. They will pronounce with hysteric resilience that the 31 per cent vote for Narendra Modi is ‘also’ a vote for the Hindu Rashtra. So what about the promise of Vikaas? Development? Acche Din? Bullet Trains? 10 per cent growth? Jobs for All? 100 smart cities? All dirty sewage and chemical drains, including Ganga and Yamuna, to be turned pristine, like the dudh-ghee ki nadiya of the pristine past? All the filth in our soul and on our streets will evaporate with the magic broom of the Invincible Batman of the Dark Nights. Toilets for all? Neck-to-Neck with China and the US? Asian Tiger? Super power? Forget the Delhi gang-rape, and the daily rapes; all women in India to be totally safe in all spaces under his benign umbrella? A Ram Rajya, indeed, with Modi as Ram?
The hoardings? The promises? The ad-campaign?
They can wait. But the Hindu Rashtra can’t wait. Ghar wapasi, right now, awaken the Hindu Rashtra! Hound the secularists and the minorities. Ban progressive history. Desecrate the churches. Don’t celebrate Christmas. Burn the books!
Thereby, it is a communal vote. For by, of, for the RSS/VHP/Bajrang Dal and the multiple lumpen outfits which have mushroomed under their auspices. Thereby, it is a vote against the Muslims, Christians, and, perhaps, all minorities, dissenters, liberals, secularists, pseudo secularists, Leftists, Left-of-Centrists, socialists, feminists, and, maybe, those who call themselves Indian ‘constitutionalists’ — believers in the Indian Constitution drafted by Dr BR Ambedkar. Either you are with us, or with them: it’s like the Bush Doctrine. Or, we will smoke you out with our hate campaign into our primordial caves of the great mythical Hindutva insomnia when planes flew across the planets and Ganesha celebrated the plastic surgery and botoxed women preceded the seductive nymphets of Amar Chitra Katha.
There is no ‘other’ here; the ‘other’ is the intimate enemy and beloved, the ally and loyalist, the fanatic and crusader of the ultimate Hindutva dream sequence. There is no ‘good faith’ here either. Good faith is an infinite, bad, secular dream. It cuts a lousy record. It stinks of the freedom movement and the revolutionary movements. Of Gandhi and Bhagat Singh. So erect statues of Nathuram Godse in every public square of the land. The world moves in a vicious half-circle of ‘bad faith’. Relentless, breathless, bad faith.
The more bad it is, the more hate you can manufacture, the more sublime is the world of Hindutva.
They are the neo-crusaders, the new conquerors of the mythical golden cities, half-dreamt in the patriarchal nightmares of a castrated political unconscious, like a Freudian sleepwalker floating in a comic-cosmos fragrant with the holy smell of cow dung and cow urine re-mixed with ghee. Like Neo-Nazis celebrating the concentration camps.
They are he and he is them and he is they, the multi-layered oligarchy and the octopus trapped in a school text-book fragmented democracy of ‘unity and diversity’. All the masked, unmasked, Ku Klux Klan of backward capitalism, and feudal MCPs, transparently retarded, abjectly illiterate, anti-Christ, anti-modernity, totalitarian, anti-democracy, shallow as hell, and anti-history. The neo-protagonists of religious revivalism, morbid dogmatism, male chauvinism, retarded fanaticism.
The more they look for symphony, the more jarring they sound. And yet, it is a ‘nationalist’ orchestra. They all sing hoarse and besura, out of tune and out of sync, but they are all in it together, sinking drinking water, wallowing in the hate politics of sectarian arrogance, the half-girlfriend of mediocrity, full-time fascists stalking the land.
They are not only looking for absolute wisdom inside the urinary tracts of the holy cow, they have discovered genetic science in the Mahabharata with Kunti’s love child, Karna, with the sun god, in immaculate conception. They have even rediscovered nuke tests being performed “lakhs of years” ago in the Hindu Rashtra of abstract time and space, and the great virtues of the caste system’s varna vyavastha in the gutters of their hallucinations.
I tell you, even Darwin could not find the ‘missing link’ which ‘Dr’ Praveen Togadia has so effortlessly found. Remember his ramblings after the Gujarat genocide 2002: We will enforce the “successful Gujarat experiment” all over the country, he threatened, openly. He is a doc, he should know. He is still threatening to first re-make the entire Indian population as Hindu, and then, turn the world into a Hindu nation. If there is a “Make in India” actually on their mind, it is this. Rest is as bogus as the magic potion of acche din, etc.
Hence, this is their daily holy chant, their pathological obsession, their archival day-dream, their nocturnal fantasy. They will do exactly that, and they are doing exactly that, and that is how their brains have been brainwashed with their own brand of genetic and plastic surgery, with a glass full of cow urine on the rocks.
And it is not only the Gujarat model, or the Naroda Patiya/Best Bakery/Gulberg Society Model, the Golwalkar/Auschwitz Model, or the Muzaffarnagar Riots Model, or the Trilokpuri Riots Model: these are multiple models soaked with brutality, violence and human tragedy which is their hidden trump-card, their food for thought, their daily nourishment, their original ultra-nationalism, their quotable quote of the day. That is why they never participated in the freedom movement. That is why they are against all progressive currents and people’s movements. That is why they hate secularism.
Every time they hunt the minorities, every time they spread hate on the wings of their fanatic quagmires, every time they trap the entire pluralist society into a retrograde carnivorous machine of barbarism, they produce and reproduce their lunatic fringe as the mainstream, and their mainstream as the lunatic fringe. Between the two, there is no twilight zone, no blurred lines, no gulf of critical introspection. The more different they seem, the more same they are.
They are them, them is he, the octopus is he, them is the hydra-headed monster, they are the carnivorous creatures of eternal megalomania and eternal hate. And they will never change. Not in this lifetime.
Unless they get the Hindu Rashtra. One culture, one religion, one nation. No wonder, their ideological founders were wallowing in praise for Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust.
Like Ramdev with Z security, who allegedly claimed that he knows how to cure AIDS, soon, they will claim that they were the original Vedic magic docs who discovered both allopathy and homeopathy, antibiotics, paracetamol and crocin, the Jaipur foot, blood transfusion and chemotherapy, sleeping tablets and Viagra, flavoured condoms and Mala-D, and, of course, the forever medicinal and psychic virtues of cow urine – neat, no ice, no soda. Even while all the spies were falling from the skies in Rig Vedic times, the first moles with mint in the hole.
So, in the era of ‘ghar wapasi‘, who can stop Darwin’s missing link spy who returned from the cold? Even Einstein and Newton will now have to do a rethink.
Meanwhile, the fat cats and corporates, those who subsidised the ‘live’ onslaught on salivating television channels, hoardings, and elsewhere across all public spaces, with saturated publicity promising acche din etc, involving millions in terms of money spent, they are still waiting. Waiting for Modi’s Godot. Except, perhaps Adani, bankrolled by the State Bank of India in Australia, a public sector enterprise. Other fat cats are shouting hoarse: bure sitaare, bure din… kab aayenge acche din…? Yeh dil maange more… par yeh kyo nikla bore…?
Their daily mourning and lament becomes louder and louder, like a shrill cacophony in full blast, like juvenile delinquents in the chorus of half-puberty, like a third-rate remix of Right-wing retards pretending to be ‘nationalist visionaries’. Check out the disgruntled economists who turned ‘him’ into Greatness Incarnate, a yug purush; or the currently traumatised ex-feminist (Smriti Irani? why? why? why?) who turned him into a demi-god of progress and prosperity; or the hysterical columnists and anchors who suddenly discovered the ‘revelation’ of the birth of a prophet from the holy shores of Gujarat. Now that the prophet walks backwards, and every dream seem still-born, bitter and bamboozled, and every legitimate longing of backward capitalism nothing but an illegitimate fetish half-cooked in hyperbole, they seem to be trapped between ghar wapasi and the promised land. Hence, the daily lament and mourning.
So, whatever happened to the half-empty glass? Who will drink this lovely nectar with the brand-mark of gaumutra written all over it?
Hence, it’s back to square zero. The stunning realisation that the prophecies are turning out to be lies, or that the world will not invest in a country with communal polarisation as a daily ritual of hate politics, backed by the State, that the market will slump and so will the political economy despite oil prices going low, that the rouble has collapsed and so might the ‘Asian Tiger’ economies, that agriculture is sinking into the netherworld, that the pipe-dream of India peaking China on the growth chart seems as fantastic as plastic surgery of ancient times, that Barack Obama did not give an inch to India, nor did Xi Zinping, that Madison Square Garden garbas by stinking rich NRI Gujaratis and live shows on TV does not translate into a treasure island. That all the gas is nothing but gas and it stinks of rotten eggs and the bubble might just about go phoos… And that acche din was just an opportunist and cold-blooded ad-guru’s twist in the macabre tale…
It is all becoming transparent, as transparent as the fraudulent ‘good governance day’ on Christmas and the fake ‘pledge of cleanliness’ on Gandhi Jayanti. In the end, it all reminds of fake symbolism, nothing solid on ground, except the magic broom.
Remember the metaphor ‘Feku’? The ‘PR’ Rambo who rescued ‘Gujarati pilgrims’ in the Uttarakhand man-made catastrophe, with a fleet of Innovas and big planes? The metaphor returns, like the spies from the Vedic skies and the planes which flew across the planets during pre-historic times with air-hostesses hired from the comic-strips of Amar Chitra Katha.
Guess what is the joke on FB after the massive (pro-poor?) 20 per cent cut in the health budget with half the country’s women and children malnourished and outside any primary health system? That all those who voted for ‘him’, in case of illness, will now only get an injection of ‘Hindutva’. Flavoured, perhaps, with the magic potions of ancient India. And, of course, a monthly dose of Mann ki baat with 3Ds etc.
Now, all that remains is another fake poem by Prasoon Joshi, who, along with Piyush Pandey, was the genius ad-gurus behind many of the fake dreams hatched before May 2014. All in all, that will be truly a gift in the New Year in the time of Hindu Rashtra and viral fever in a country where human life is as cheap as always.
Indeed, after the farce, comes the nightmare. Merry Christmas folks. Stay warm. And a Happy New Year to all of you. Hold your hangover. Avoid plastic surgery. Amen.
