“Is this the dawn we were looking for?” – Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Call it, if you will, the glumness of dotage, but as one who is almost as old as our nation’s Independence, the end of another year is, willy-nilly, no longer a period for merry-making and new resolutions but an occasion for critical reminiscence and sombre reflection. As the curtain comes down on a tumultuous year of reckoning for democracy, it is time to take stock of how we have fared in relation to the three values that matter most in a truly egalitarian society viz. justice, freedom and fraternity.

The country is saddled with a political dispensation that has, over a decade, waged war against our secular polity and even the rule of law. Our democracy is disfigured beyond recognition, our freedoms circumscribed and secularism – the animating credo of our Republic – swamped by the majoritarian Hindutva canon and its cultish kingpin.

I hark back to a time that seems aeons ago when there was a comforting sense of affinity and fellowship among people that cut across religion, caste and language; when festivities, national triumphs and sorrows brought people together in solidarity, when we celebrated our common humanity. Inspired by the Mahatma’s rousing message of truth, brotherhood and non-violence, we willed ourselves into believing the myth that our blood-soaked land was a haven of spirituality, non-violence and tolerance.

But the mask has slipped. Our resolve to be a just, humane society has crumbled under the weight of hatred, violence and chicanery. The happenings in the last decade have laid bare our spiritual bankruptcy, intolerance and bigotry. Never have we been so disengaged from one another. We seem to have lost the capacity for compassion, for brotherly love, for ordinary humanity. Exploiting our deathless caste, communal and regional cleavages, the bigots have transformed the largest democracy into a schizophrenic nation besieged by hate. Presiding over the psychic wreckage is the most menacingly powerful socio-political conglomerate ever – the Sangh Parivar – that has fattened on the politics of hate and division.

The exclusivist and homogenising creed –........

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