Reality Bites: A tale of three cronies, farm laws and the dear leader

There’s a tug of war game between two socio-economic groups: on one side it’s the farmers who want the new farm laws scrapped, on the other it is corporate India. The farmers have conviction and fire in the belly, while corporate India has the BJP, the media, money, and a chance to earn even more money at the cost of the farmers, hooray.

As the protest by farmers has intensified, mainstream media have suddenly been flooded with the Dear Leader’s three favourite cronies gushing over him the way batty American television evangelists sing, dance, and praise the Lord.

Crony No 1 is the chap who used to lend his airplane to the Dear Leader before he became the Dear Leader—he has now received many airports across India as a generous thank you present. His strategy to fight farmers was simple: a PR blitzkrieg. So, in the second week of December, while farmers were burning his effigy and boycotting his products, many publications carried the exact same story praising him and the Dear Leader in the same breath—one cannot exist without the other, see? Some were far too lazy to change the words to make them look less PR-ish. It was like the BJP IT cell getting cabinet ministers and bots (no difference really) to copy-paste a tweet. The gist of the PR message: Crony No 1 had survived a kidnapping attempt and a terrorist attack, so why on earth would he be frightened of wussy farmers, hah!

Crony No 2 is not a happy bunny either. Farmers are burning his effigy and banning his products and services as well. Instead of stodgy PR, he made a video call to Mark Zuckerberg in which he sang hosannas to the Dear Leader, and ensured that it was aired on national television. How very odd—is making video calls public the new name-dropping technique?

Hey, I know quite a few CEOs of multinational companies far better than Crony No 2 knows Zuckerberg, and I wonder if news channels would be interested in airing my video calls with them too (for a small fee, of course). I can promise you my conversations with them will be far more colourful and irreverent than the sycophantic tripe I heard. Such a pity that Zuckerberg is naturally poker-faced—that dull video call may have gone viral if he had been a normal human being and regurgitated his last meal on screen.

Crony No 3 hasn’t got much to do with farmers, so his effigy wasn’t burnt nor were his products banned—yet. Also, his wise predecessors had created lots of goodwill for his company, something he still lives off. When his company was recently given some award or the other by some chamber of commerce thingie, he thanked the Dear Leader for it so profusely, it was as though he had received another large plot of land dirt cheap for a factory to build little cars for Noddy and Big Ears. This was beamed on national television to prod viewers into thinking if the Dear Leader is so bright and wonderful, the farmers must be wicked and ungrateful creatures, right? Oh well. We know Crony No 3 needs the Dear Leader’s help to win an important court case, an airline, more projects, et cetera.

Cronies of these three big cronies are doing their bit too—that’s what friends are for, after all.

When they are interviewed these days, they sweetly stop talking about themselves for a moment to praise the farm laws. India Inc is closing ranks which is only expected because they move in the same exalted circles, and oh the shame of being dropped out of party guest lists! Also, who on earth will their kids marry if they’re shunned by corporate giants? Indian business families mainly marry each other—just like British royals only married other European royals in the bad old days.

These you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours antics are beginning to anger citizens. We should send do-it-yourself packs of prickly heat powder and back-scratchers to the Dear Leader and India Inc in protest. We’d better hurry up because this crony capitalism mess we’re in is getting out of hand.

Also, it’s getting colder and the farmers are still out there.

( Any resemblance to people or events in real life is a coincidence)