Modi is an architect of fractures, that’s the credo with which he has marched since he deciphered, with diabolical clarity, the dividends of Gujarat 2002
Sankarshan Thakur
There is a vice greater than the vice of bigotry and its attendant ills. It is the vice of giving it a free pass, the vice of collaboration.
Early on the morning of July 31, as the superfast train service from Jaipur neared Bombay, Chetan Singh, a constable in the Railway Protection Force, cocked his service weapon and shot his senior, ASI Tika Ram Meena, dead. He then proceeded, unhindered, across vestibules, picked out three Muslim men by their beards and possibly also their attire, and killed each at close range. Murder accomplished and prejudice foregrounded, he stood at the head of one bleeding victim and annotated his crime as if he were spelling out the Preamble to New India — the operatives of Pakistan will have to go, want to stay here, the choice will have to be Modi and Yogi and Thackeray, clearly not the Uddhav edition. He seemed okay with being filmed on smartphone, probably wanted his message widely broadcast; co-passengers, palpably unperturbed by the horror they’d witnessed, obliged from multiple angles. Chetan Singh’s superiors initially said he was mentally disturbed. A subsequent medical examination revealed no clinical illness. That revelation was swiftly withdrawn. We have heard nothing since of Chetan or his cold and audacious act of terror. It came and passed. Save the ranks of our minorities, it didn’t light up fears. It didn’t darken our clotted conscience.
Around the same time, an eminently preventable pirouette of violence was allowed to be enacted in a Muslim-majority district outlying Delhi, and became, within no time, a flaming ruse to torch the minorities with — homes and hearths, lives and livelihoods, from cradle to charpoy, corner shop to kiosk, all instantly labelled illicit and dismembered — age, sex, occupation no bar. It wasn’t merely a mob marauding, it was the State which counts amongst its key instruments these days, the bulldozer. About the only outcry was over the accumulation of garbage and the stench rising from the gated high-rises of Gurgaon as the disruption gathered ground: “Where have all our workers gone?”
By the time the Gurgaon fires turned to embers, Manipur had burnt for three months, hurled into a civil war that pitched not only the citizenry but also security formations on rival sides of fences. Beyond the battling ethnicities of Manipur, how many has any of that bothered? From the prime minister of the nation it has thus far elicited a heckled subclause of concern that soon meandered into complex whataboutery; thirty odd seconds, which would make it ten or so seconds for each month of Manipur’s season in hell. Chetan Singh and Gurgaon await their turn…..
After the truth-shower 