Wall, a word that has multiple meanings and literary functions that sometimes the deepest of the meanings can be conveyed by this simple word. Remember that during the Cultural Revolution in Beijing? Chinese people put posters in public places expressing their views and speaking about their sufferings on a wall in Beijing that popularly came to be known as the Democracy Wall.
It seems like contemporary India, which has many similarities to Nazi Germany, like the slogan ‘Heil Hitler’ and its Indian avatar ‘Modi Modi,’ needs a similar democracy wall. But, who would give us this vertical platform?
Secularism Under Threat
Communal politics rules over secularism. The party in power thoroughly believes in religious ideologies, the principal cause of religious riots and lynchings all across the country. The set of communal, religious people, fundamentalists of any religion, not only hurt the sentiments of people from other religions, but they end up killing them in the name of God. Such incidents have put the very idea of a secular and plural country like India in threat.
Unprecedented Unemployment
It has become very easy to call someone who tries to perform the function of a democratic person in a free country, by asking significant questions, as an “anti-national” or an “anti-Indian”.
People who believe in democracy are really in distress. Under the NDA government, we saw that job creation, the essential job of the state machinery, did not reach even close to half its claims. However, when the then-president of the BJP, Amit Shah, was asked about this, he replied with an even less satisfactory answer, that it is nearly impossible to provide jobs for 125 crores people citing that self-employment is a big source of employment for people in the country.
At this point, I want to ask: if self-employment is a big source of employment, then, why did the unemployment rate rise to around 7.2% in February 2019, the worst in 28 months? Why has the number of employed people declined by more than 18 million?
False Promises
The rise of fascism is taking place. The new era of anachronism is taking place. A BJP minister spoke about the establishment of the Ram temples, where they got their way, but doesn’t talk about the establishment of schools, the establishment of hospitals. He sternly pointed at the very important fact that the main agenda of the ruling party is to create temples across India.
Another sector where the situation is worsening is agriculture. Our respected prime minister made huge promises of giving assurances to the farmers of more than 50% profit, but, it has been found that the income of the farmers has hardly incurred any noted growth over the last five years.
Let us recall an incident where our Mr Modi held a rally at Varanasi and delivered ‘inspiring’ and lengthy speeches. Thousands of people gathered to chant the ‘Modi’ slogans but nobody realized that the rally caused the destruction of the crops; the reason being the construction of two helipads for his special landing.
When the 60-year-old farmer Chamela Devi asked the officials about it, she was told that she would be getting compensation, or, in case, she doesn’t get it, she could claim the possession of the bricks. Later on, the bricks were taken away and her son was beaten up after he refused the government’s action of taking away the bricks.
So who were destroyed? Or is it just another brick in the wall, eh? A wall of false promises.
All these problems were not pointed out by popular media channels. Rather the campaign, along with the propaganda, was hugely portrayed through social media followed by advertisements at public places like petrol pumps. People are being subjected to misfortunes and lies regularly, and the government is leveraging the paid media to promote itself.
A Country Needs Its Youth for Development
Any country needs to be questioned by the young and liberal minds. It’s they who, through their critique and new ideas, shape the country. (It’s not the age; it’s anyone who has the power to connect with people and their outstanding humanity and valor.) Questions should be asked so that people get to know more from the liberal young and educated minds. But, for developing this ability to question, education is necessary.
However, it’s that very structure that the BJP-led government has harmed and ignored in order to stop producing ‘questioning minds.’ In propagating its policies of communalism, centralisation, and commercialisation the education sector was isolated, as profit-maximisation became the main motive for the private capital on whose support the government runs.
The Hindutva agenda is brought to the country, thereby leading to the destruction of the federal character of the Indian education and crippling it beyond repair. (Think about changing significant developments in the history notebooks, attack on the best of universities, and more.)
We must question why people are being influenced by this ‘nationalism,’ whose very notion the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore warned us against. We must ask the PM, who promised a lot and when it came to delivering, said that “selling pakodas” will be a great self-employment exercise instead of proper employment.
We must ask questions: Why have voters been denied the right to know about the funding of the government? Who’s funding whom and how much? Why isn’t proper education given to us? Why education is costly and lives so cheap (mob lynching)? Why did demonetisation fail to curb the black money problem, for which it was rolled out? What happened to the “give me 50 days” claim of the 56-inch PM?
Over the last 5 years, the institutions of the state have been injured badly. They seem to be either singing praises of the government or made irrelevant. More than 10 million Indians lost their jobs. Unemployment numbers have hit an unprecedented mark in the last 45 years. Why are we not talk about these issues? Why is someone called “anti-national” when one questions the government?
The nation seriously wants to know answers to all these questions. Break this wall and ask questions.
Let us build a wall of democracy rather than getting trapped inside the wall of autocracy.