Why the voters' 2014 slap still stings the Opposition cheek

Once upon a time, not too long ago, the mind was without fear, the head was held high, no walls fragmented society, and Indians awoke to a heavenly freedom every morning.

A peaceful, prosperous land, India was suffused with harmony where communal riots were non-existent and none used religion for political gain.

Minorities, living cheek by jowl with Hindus, were as secure as the gold at Fort Knox, and women were never in harm’s way.

The economy was booming, jobs were plentiful, financial offences hadn’t been invented. Farmers didn’t know what to do with all their wealth, courts and EVMs were fair, gubernatorial appointments were apolitical, Kashmir wasn’t a problem and terrorism had yet to pay us a visit.

That’s what those who lost in 2014 want us to believe. Brimming with advice now on how governments should be run, they scarcely took their own counsel while ruling us.

Thus, four years hence, the resounding slap the electorate administered still stings their cheeks.

Smarting at having been shown the door and aching to grab back control, the alliance of the vanquished has resorted to various tricks to discredit this government, rarely letting truth get in the way.

So, Indians are told — with more than a little help from a complicit section of the media, carefully cultivated over decades — that corruption wasn’t bad, it didn’t kill anyone; that the dictatorial regime during the Emergency was good as there was order in the country; and big deal if Dalits and farmers died under the Congress watch and that its ‘hands are stained with Muslim blood’, at least they were happy prior to 2014.

The Opposition insists all industrialists are crooks, courts once dispensed justice but are biased now, ‘saffron’ is communal and dissenters are sanghis or bhakts.

Someone will soon prove my point by calling me just that, or worse.

We must be indebted to governments that lorded over us for decades, who, while filling their pockets, could hardly find the time to do what they were mandated to do.

We are supposed to be beholden to the Congress for having kept people poor, for having imposed the Emergency that crushed our fundamental rights, for thrusting phony secularism upon us, for deflecting attention from numerous riots during their regime that killed thousands and for making ordinary, law-abiding citizens feel like criminals because they were born Hindu or in the ‘upper caste’ or voted against it.

The Congress, the Left and the rest of this frustrated fraternity insist our right to freedom of speech has been snatched away, women are not safe anymore, democracy is dying and the best thing to happen to us, since kheer kadam, would be for a dynast to rule us.

We need to be obligated to the communists as their legion of liberal intellectuals owns the repository of the world’s wisdom, as they who gave this planet its cruelest dictators now masquerade as the champions of democracy: matters little if a few sanghis are killed just for fun.

We must also genuflect before political parties that wave the secularism flag, peddle fiction and incite Dalits, farmers, women and minorities to despise the ‘right wing’ because it defeated them.

Unable to palate the 2014 drubbing, a terrified Opposition shivers at the thought of not being able to wrest back power and has thus taken to spreading lies and fear.

Till 2014, we are supposed to believe, India was a land of riches and thereafter everything fell apart. The argument is that since this government, in the four years of its tenure, has been unable to wipe out the mess created over 60 years of incompetence, it has no right to continue in office.

The present-day government, of course, must answer for whatever it has failed at and will indeed be put to the sword in 2019, but to blame it alone for our woes is intellectual dishonesty.

Just as it would be trickery to suggest that previous governments had no hand in nation-building. They did, but to claim that by doing their job shoddily they did us a favour is appalling. This government too would be held to the same merciless standard.

Appropriating credit for all things good and accusing the current dispensation for everything imperfect is falsehood. Disregarding the efforts of a non-Congress-led administration helping build the nation further exposes a depraved mentality.

Unless forces opposed to the ‘right wing’ evolve a narrative not based on their hatred for one man alone, cease fear-mongering and stop vilifying the majority community, chances are their cheeks will continue to sting harder and longer.

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