Indian politics is a massive spectrum. It has space for everyone and everything, almost. With all the possible voices of rejection, it harbours avowed anti-nationals like Kanhaiya and Khalid. With a gushing overflow of emotions boiling against such people, it shelters the fundamentalist and caliphate admirers like Owaisi & Nizami. It has all the space for turncoats like Arun Shourie and Hamlets like Kumar Vishwas and also the unnecessary prolonger like Sachin Pilot. The one thing for which it didn’t have space for many decades is certainly an opinion that goes against the status quo. There are many examples that we can cite to prove this point and Namboodiripad’s government turned down or many voices of rejection shunned during the emergency by Indira Gandhi, the dirtiest blot on Indian democracy would suffice it. The self-proclaimed messiahs of freedom of expression or FoE in modern terms often shout that the Congress governments have been very liberal in terms of criticism, dissent and space for adverse opinions. However, history is dirty and we all know it!
After the rise of Narendra Modi during his successive and very successful tenures as the CM of Gujarat, there were many attempts at assassinating his character and also a few attempts at literally assassinating him for the reasons we are all witnessing now. After Modi came to Delhi with a mandate that many champions of FoE could not digest even after the second term’s thumping majority, the liberal narrative has often been challenged passionately, debated openly and, more than often, defeated emphatically. While any fair war of narratives would be battled with certain policies, code of conduct and rules of fair engagement, in India, the battle of narratives is fought by the liberals (ironically) without any display of liberalism. Something that Prashant Bhushan says should be accepted with folded hands, slightly bent head and humble heart. However, something that Kapil Mishra says should be hated, dejected, rejected, pummelled, attacked severely and not even heard. If you dare ask – why? – without a single second wasted, you will be hurled with the trademark adjectives used by people posing as the guardians of FoE, sly in nature and shallow in substance – bhakts, RSS, BJP IT cell, Modi Bhakts, Nationalist (one should be proud to be), kattar, fundamentalist, nonsense, illogical, rustic, villager, uneducated, illiterate, outdated… what and what not! And all these just for expressing an opinion or trying to reason about that opinion. Can you believe the liberal narrative to be liberal anymore? Liberals in India, and we know who fit inside the basket, are the most intolerant people who have nothing to say apart from what they are fed to vomit!
Liberals in India have not been able to settle with the dawn that heralded the occurrence of a new phenomenon in Indian politics – Narendra Modi. They are not yet able to digest the fact that their access to the secret corridors of power and shinning marbles of the 7 RCR floor have been curbed and they cannot be a part of the decision-making, policy-making and ruling the country as they used to be during the silent era of Indian politics. The frustration that was often displayed in the form of absurdities like award-wapsi and intolerance howls has taken the form of stage-6 intellectual cancer in the so-called liberals which cannot be cured by any means possible on this planet.
The biggest challenge for the liberals in India was to defend all the false history, geography, myth around a family, propaganda around the freedom movement and many more intellectual jargon or, in short, the narrative-hegemony that they have created with their incessant efforts during all these decades after the independence. However, fortunately for the country, they could not defend it and the house of cards fell to bite the dust of truth and taste a bite of its destiny. A teenager scolds a historian for her fake history and she cannot bear it. A youth slams a journalist for his propaganda and he cannot bear it. A young politician opens up the list of scams by the government in which a senior leader was a party and he cannot digest it. The list can go up to innumerable numbers and it might take all the day. However, the outcome in all these cases will be similar – abuse, labelling with adjectives or just killing the dialogue. LIBERALS IN INDIA DO NOT WANT DIALOGUE. Can you believe it?
A liberal means a person who believes in dialogue, discussions and debates. However, the champions of FoE in India will abuse you in private, curse you in public and taunt you on social media. When you try to fight back, they will block, mute or simply call you a bhakt and voila – the intellectual liberal status unlocked or alleviated or upgraded… huh! And so, you should know once and for all that LIBERALS are the most fake, phoney, shallow and intolerant people in India right now. Expose them. Keep exposing them. Expose them more!
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Great article. I think liberals cannot fathom that Hindus would support actual roots and were sick of being treated as “unfair” or “non secular” or whatever other labels were slapped on us. So many of us, who even live abroad are sick of being apologetic for being Hindu. We have our own identity, outside of being conquered and we are CLAIMING it now. For those that think our history only started with the conquerors can live in that thought but majority of us do not accept it. And honestly, I am sick of being tied to Muslims. We are our own people and we are reclaiming ourselves — whether anyone likes it or not.