Is fighting for your rights a waste of time?

Fighting for your rights is a waste of time. Is that cynicism in the extreme from some disgruntled citizen who has had it with lying politicians and uncooperative government officials? Do we not sympathize a tiny bit with this thought? What is there to be gained after all from protests and disagreements? The system is too big, you’re never going to win.

Agree?

What happens when the Prime Minister of a Democratic Republic tells you this? Do you immediately mug up the class VI civics textbook that this prime minister had someone read to him, the one which lists out how citizens don’t just have rights they also have duties?

I can see those of you who do. You are the Chief Destroyers of India. Disgruntled Citizen at least tried and felt he had lost hope. But those of you who do not try at all? Weak Capitulators, hand in hand with a dictatorial undemocratic attitude.

That a Prime Minister should say this before he launches into a massive Republic Day celebration is in fact no accident at all. It is a warning to India that whatever you still took for granted as a democratic right is actually under severe threat.

The Republic Day celebration itself only reinforced this policy of the withdrawal of rights for citizens. Controversies over some non-BJP states being denied parade tableaux, the dousing of the Amar Jawan Jyoti to be “merged” elsewhere, the removal of Mahatma Gandhi’s favourite hymn ‘Abide with Me’, from the Beating the Retreat ceremony.

The waters were tested in previous years, the protests were judged as being weak and inadequate, and as a pandemic and economic devastation reinforced the insignificance of democratic rights in the face of devastation, the hammer came down.

You have no rights is what the Prime Minister said, no matter how you spin it. How many around you approve of what this means? There are those faux-naïve fools who applaud the Singapore method of island dictatorship: see how efficient, how things get done. And the next step up are the closet fascists: look at China, they don’t bother with democracy and rights. They just get things done.

Is it likely that some closet fascists are a little confused after the Covid pandemic and the People’s Liberation Army’s easy strolls into Indian sovereignty? Don’t get confused. They are happy that the Prime Minister took such a strong step and went as far as to ban TikTok as revenge for the murder of a few Indian soldiers.

They’ll still buy their Apple phones made in China, and they’ll still admire the totalitarian nature of Party decision-making. You can see vestiges of this in the fact that democracy was withdrawn from some of those very areas where China now has free run. Do your duty now: support Chinese incursions and applaud the Prime Minister for his refusal to even name China. He knows best, does he not?

And so do our “get on with it like China” friends, when it comes to destroying democracy. The Association for Democratic Reforms has just released its latest list of assets declared by political parties. In 2013-14, the BJP declared Rs. 780 crore while the Congress declared Rs. 767 crore. In 2019-20, the BJP declared Rs. 4,847 crore while the Congress declared Rs. 588 crore.

Follow the money and you’ll find some of our main supporters of democratic suppression and Hindu supremacism.

The funny thing – not that one can really laugh here – but Prime Minister Narendra Modi often boasts that on his journey to the top, he was part of a the Navnirman movement in Gujarat, where students protested various campus grievances in the early 1970s. You know, exercising his democratic rights. Violence and anarchy resulted when the Congress (I) government in the state unleased the police on the protestors.

The RSS itself supported Jayaprakash Narayan’s fight against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency which followed. Something to do with democratic freedoms, as far as I recall.

Don’t let’s get bogged down in words like “irony”. There is no irony here. This is a well-planned campaign, years in the making. And every idiot citizen who applauds a suggestion that democratic rights are not important is just one more goosestepping foot soldier in the massive movement to make India into a Hindu supremacist nation.

Modi’s words are aimed also at those who have dared to protest. From the anti-CAA voices of two years ago to the farmers who were far more successful in their one-year long protest against Modi’s farm laws and managed to humiliate Modi and his government into retracting them.

People who don’t like democracy have very thin skins. And petty, ferocious tempers. You bow down to them, you bow forever.

(Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and political commentator. Views are personal)