“My strength is the strength of the oppressed, my courage is the courage of desperation.” – Bhagat Singh
The violence that took place in Tripura after the elections is a rare glimpse of what the country has actually come up to. Does wining an election justify violence and vandalism? Does wining an election allow you tag everyone else as ‘anti-national’? Does Bharat mata (Mother India) not tolerate the ideology of the left?
If that’s the India the BJP want, I do not want to be part of it. Neither do I think all the freedom fighters who fought for our rights would want to be a part of it. This is not the idea of India I would give my life for. In my India, we take pride in difference. The India I see now can’t tolerate any idea opposed to that of BJP.
If believing in socialism, believing in equality, makes you ‘anti-national’, then that would make people like Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad and EMS Nambooripad ‘anti-national’. That would make Ambedkar ‘anti-national’. It would also make a significant portion of the citizens of this country – who happen to be left leaning – ‘anti-national’.
Media channels are more than ready to rake up violence by the Left without conducting any research or investigation at all. Why aren’t attacks by the right wing not news material? Is the national media scared of the ruling government? Have they surrendered their ethics to the powerful?
I am a proud communist, but should I be scared of being one in Modi’s India? Does believing in socialism make it okay for the Prime Minister to see me as a second class citizen? Should I become one of those right wingers burning offices and bringing down statues to not be treated in this step-motherly fashion? Is thinking that the farmers and labourers are as important for the country as the Ambanis and Adanis, and trying to give them a voice, a crime in the eyes of BJP’s India?
I understand that this article poses many questions and offers little in the way of answers. That’s what our country has come to. I don’t know how to change this – there seem to be no solutions now. This is what India has become to anyone believing in an ideology that is endorsed by the RSS.
Comrades, we are cut from the cloth of the likes of Bhagat singh. In hard times, we push on, like he did. The revolution never ends. We will fight the forces of fascism, for our right to think freely, for our right to write freely, for our right to talk freely. Because they can take everything but they can’t break our will to resist. Inquilab Zindabad (Long live the revolution)!