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Violence has been seen to be the stark signature, as well as the underlying motif, of the Modi regime. It is well to understand this in coming to grips with what happened at the recent protest of India’s youth brought together through online mobilisation under the banner of the Cockroach Janata Party, with a clutch of Leftist student organisations protesting – and fasting – alongside but separately on the same demands relating to education and employment.

Regrettably, insufficient attention has been paid in public discussion, and even by dissenters and the regime’s political opponents, to the systemic and systemised violence in Modi’s India although there is hardly an aspect of life which is not shot through with violence on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s watch.

Violence as governance

Indeed, the very idea of homogenising India’s myriad layers and selves (think of the regime slogans… ‘One Nation, One…’) – the flagship Modi project – is a massive enterprise in state violence wreaked upon one section of the population or another. The government’s intent is to bludgeon its way through if it can, or dissimulate and backtrack when it must, but only to return to the strategy at a more conducive moment.

The risk of disregarding the violence in plain sight is that not confronting systemic and visually frequent state violence can facilitate the ripening of tendencies toward pushing India along the path of fascism, which does not look to be in the far distance any more. Disregard works as impunity.

Also read: When Every Door Opens Into Another Queue – India’s Education Crisis

Key institutions of constitutional democracy have already been brought under heel. Thus we now have judicial bureaucrats, not judges; election bureaucrats, not impartial election commissioners.

Recent state elections have turned out to be a massive tragedy and a farce, spelling out syllables of violence upon key constitutional principles and premises – and eventually upon citizens, in other words ordinary Indians. Name deletions from voters lists of crores of people through the mammoth SIR exercise, and prior to that the ballot stuffing in certain other states, has ensured results that discomfit regime opponents. All this has ensued from a violent ideological framework, and its party and governmental........

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