The heart that can’t fit a straw

The much-vaunted ‘India Shining’ election ad blitz of 2004 was the kiss of death for the Vajpayee government. People looked around and saw a yawning gap between what the government claimed to have done for them, and what they were experiencing. This campaign cost the BJP in the region of Rs 150 crore, and the general election. Let’s all take a moment to wonder at just what impecunious amateurs they were back then.

That election campaign, of course, made the mistake of directing the public’s attention to the government’s record. The Modi government’s tactic is to look ever forward, towards some future idyll. It makes an exciting promise, and instead of letting voters dwell on its shattered remains in the next election campaign, it just makes an exciting new promise. And, of course, it has marshalled the power of technology, social media, and the all-governing algorithm to speak in different voices to different constituents, making public noises about freedom and democracy while injecting a steady subcutaneous river of WhatsApp poison into the body politic. The achhe din and sabka saath, sabka vikas campaigns should have cost Modi his second term, but they didn’t. He and his ventriloquist figures in government and in media have used customised narratives to effectively hack the collective conscience to focus not on reality, but on dizzying amounts of spin and pretty myths of pride and Hindu empowerment.

So today, many people look around at Covid-bereaved families, terrorised minorities, lost Indian territory, zombie institutions, steadily diminishing democratic values, rising prices, mass joblessness—the whole steaming pile of poo that is the economy—and they see, well, India shining.

Funny story, eh? There was a time when the price of onions was a body blow to a government. That was a time of innocence.

Reality should certainly deny Modi a third term, but it might not. There are many people who don’t care for him, but many of those have been hacked into thinking, “If not him, then who?” Today, despite a good smack on the snout from Bengal, the BJP squats over all of India like a giant spider.

The question is: When you have so much power, why all the needless vindictive cruelty? Why shut up the young, the pregnant, the old and sick? Why throw journalists in jail under the UAPA for trying to report? Why plant evidence on activists? Why imprison political prisoners for years without filing charges? Why paint students as terrorists? And on top of this orgy of unfreedom, why refuse the basic humanity of giving a sick old man a sippy cup and a straw in his jail cell, so that he can drink water despite his Parkinson’s?

The most consistent character trait of the BJP and its supporters has been to suppress humaneness, plurality, inclusiveness, openmindedness, respect, and rationality, and justify barbaric attitudes and acts, in the name of strength. But in an impressively long list of such attitudes and acts, denying Stan Swamy a straw is the one that best showcases the smallness of the BJP’s heart.

Smallness of heart is inherently unattractive, and projects weakness. Maybe the BJP’s malignant behaviour is a vicious spiral: driven by fear of being unattractive to certain constituents, it overcompensates with force, thereby becoming more and more unattractive and therefore more and more forceful, until it fears that its hold on power depends on fear-inducing force. Authoritarians are very insecure people.

But a cup? A straw? Exactly how insecure do you have to be, to be this hateful and heartless? If I were a better person, I might even feel a grain of pity for the ugliness of their inner lives.

(But I’m not.)

(Mitali Saran thinks a good asteroid could solve all our problems @mitalisaran)