Article by Samar April 16-30_layout

8/2/2019 Article by Samar April 16-30_layout

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O | B | V | I | O | U | S | L | Y O | P | A | Q | U | E

First, the absurd. My wall was painted

red by the saffrons. They were

writhing in anger against the injustice

done to Narendra Modi, the chief min-

ister of Gujarat. Wait, I am not referring to the

walls of the house I live in, but the one of my

profile of that ubiquitous social networking

site called Facebook that has come to define us

more than what our real existence does. So,

the saffrons had painted my, and almost any-

one elses who had something to do with India,

red.

They had detected, invented would be the

correct word though, a conspiracy against Mr.

Modi as well. Ah, the man and his almost para-

noid love for conspiracy. Such a penchant Mr.

Modi has for conspiracies. I remember, with

horror, the ones he has already exhausted.

Having done to death part accusations part

abuses like pseudo-secular, pseudo-intellectu-

al, pseudo-liberal, Pakistani/Muslim,

Italian/Christian and the likes , he would soon

have to invent new ones, I am afraid. The spin-

master he is, he may turn even that into prop-

aganda for his vibrant Gujarat by declaring it

the new Mecca, nay the New Ayodhya, for the

linguists tasked with inventing new words that

could qualify conspiracy.

So the social media, right from Facebook to

Twitter was put on fire by his over-zealous sup-

porters over his dethronement from the top

position in an online poll for choosing hundred

most influential people that was being con-

ducted by the Time, a reputed American news

magazine. As it turned out, Modi was leading

the poll till less than three days before the

scheduled closing of the voting. Further, he

was not merely leading; he was leading by a

huge margin. Such an honour it was for a per-

son who was declared persona non grata by

the American establishment not long ago, and

was denied visa despite being a democratical-

ly elected chief minister of a province of the

largest democracy of the world. Such a

Exitingunceremoniously

Narendra Modi comes an ingloriousthird in the Times Poll

BY

SAMAR


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restoration of dignity it was to the persona of

someone believed to be a mass murderer in

disguise, wasnt it?

He was leading the negative vote with an

equally huge margin as well, though his sup-

porters shied away from talking about that.

They, instead, chose to beat the seventy per

cent in favour against merely thirty per cent in

opposition as the definitive and decisive evi-

dence for the support their leader enjoys. They

had drawn the first blood and nothing could

stop them from setting propaganda machine

in motion, all cylinders firing. The victory need-

ed to be celebrated, and celebrated full on, for

it was a victory of not merely a person but of all

of Gujarat and its seventy million people. They

had started placing orders for everything that

could be used in celebrations. Gujarat, too, was

bracing up for surviving the assault of the

brigade, telling itself that no new king size

cutouts could kill aesthetics more than the old

ones, and that full page newspaper advertise-

ments have already touched the ebb and that

they could not go worse than what they

already were.

Then came the avalanche. Master divider

was pushed, unceremoniously, to the second

place by the penultimate day of voting. Not

only this, the votes against him were going up

slowly but steadily. The number of never, no

way sayers had reached precariously, of

course only for the zealots vouching for Modi,

close to those far him. The dream run was

going to be over, or was it already? The high

hopes of making it big on the cover of the Time

seemed to be running out of steam. But then,

the bigots were not going to take it lying down,

were they? They were working overtime, too,

all for finding an excuse that could explain the

failure or a hole that could puncture the bal-

loon. How much they wanted something which

could save the day for them.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately for the

sake of the human within me, I do not have any

access to the ghettos where these fanatics

live. Yet, I think I can pretty much guess what

would have transpired in the deep and dark,

nay saffron, insides of their mind to come up

with what they later did. Here is a fictional

account of that. Eureka, one of them must

have screamed at the height of his lung, for

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screaming comes easy to them anyways. This

Anonymous guy, who has pushed our

Modibhai to second place, is a Hacker he

would have shouted. Hacker? That gives us a

shot at digging up some conspiracy theory, so

close to Modibhais heart, his cohorts would

have responded. Well then, lets get down to

job and save the pride of Modibhai, that is the

pride of Gujarat by extension, and then that of

Indian nation, or perhaps that of Akhanda

Bharata as Modibhai would have preferred to

call it, one of the gang would have exhorted his

cohorts into.

Now, the stupid. Their decision had culmi-

nated into an online petition complaining to

The Time for looking into the grave matter of

Anonymous Hacker who has, according to

them, penetrated into their system and had

pushed Narendra Modi to second place while

occupying the first for himself. They had start-

ed a thousand campaigns on Facebook as well,

inundating it with abuses for the hacker, anti-

Modi secular, Left, liberal intellectuals

Muslims and Christians and calls for their

patriotic cohorts to aggressively vote for

Modibhai and save the national honour in the

process.

There was something ironically true in their

call. They had got it so right while naming all

those they believed were opposed to

Modibhai, for Modi had in fact given all of them

a reason to hate him for. Further, they sounded

so ominous in their call for aggressive voting,

for aggression, it seems, is the only natural

reaction inherent to their degenerate systems

that are human in form but beastly in nature.

There was something stupid in their call as

well, in fact not merely stupid, for it was much

more than that. Ok, I concede that no one in his

senses would ever accuse a Modi supporter of

being corrupted by something as silly as

rationality and knowledge. Yet, expecting them

to read the thing before launching a tirade

would definitely not be too much to expect

from them, would it? But then, those who can

demolish expectations as innocuous as behav-

ing like humans do can defy anything just as

easily, cant they?

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As it came out, they had not bothered to

read the description of Anonymous as offered

by The Time, forget checking it anywhere else.

They confused the world-wide group ofAnonymous ethical hackers that has proved to

be resilient enough to be up and kicking

despite an across the world crack down on

them with some anonymous hacker operating

out of his cubicle to manufacture money out of

his malwares.

If only they were following even The Time,

they would have known that the term

Anonymous has assumed an aura of right-

eousness, not the pretended one of their sort,

but one that denotes the resolute participation

of the common person on struggles that start-

ed in the Arab Street and ran through the Wallstreet, engulfing all the dictatorships that fell

in between.

If only they had known that this

Anonymous was not the anonymous that spe-

cialized in the art of hiding himself behind a

saffron mask for killing and maiming citizens

as they did in Gujarat in that fateful summer of

2002. No, this Anonymous is the one that has

kept that space of resistance on the internet up

despite regular arrests of its key members in a

pan-European witch-hunt much in the same

way as the Anonymous citizens who bore the

brunt of the first round of army fire to give birth

to democracies out of US supported dictator-

ships.

But then, as I said earlier, can one really

expect reason from those who rejoice in killinghapless people? Can one expect calls of har-

mony and peace from those who refuse to

wear a Muslim skull-cap even while flaunting

all others in their Sadbhavana fasts? Can we

expect an attempt of reconciliation from a

Chief Minister who was accused of not follow-

ing the RajaDharma by the Prime Minister of

the country belonging to his own party?

But can we expect this person to win the

race of being most influential person of the

world, even if the race does not mean much in

itself? Not really, for the blood that they spilt in

Gujarat is too thick to be forgotten by eventhose who claim to be friends of the murderer.

No one has forgotten how Nitish Kumar, Chief

Minister of Bihar and a senior leader of

National Democratic Alliance, has shooed

Narendra Modi away threatening his Bhartiya

Janta Party to break the alliance if they bring

Modi in for canvassing in Bihar. Can we really

forget how stubbornly had he refused to share

dais with this sectarian leader?

Forget all this, for even the BJPs own unit of

Uttar Pradesh did not let him canvass there

during the assembly elections fearing all the

negativity it will cause. Narendra Modi is also

just one, according to Nitin Gadakri, President

of the BJP, of tens in the race for the post of

Prime Ministership in the party. Can such a

person, shooed away from Bihar and unwel-

come in Uttar Pradesh, be the most influential

person even in India, forget the world? No, he

cannot. The Time had made a mistake and the

Anonymous corrected that.

At last, the humiliation. To the grins of his

detractors, including two-third of his party

members, Mr Modi was not merely pushed to

third place by the end of the voting but had

also secured the dubious distinction of garner-

ing more negative votes than the positive ones.

Perhaps such shameless attempts of forcing

oneself in the international are fated to end in

such exemplary failures. Supporters of Modi,

though, can convert this into an opportunity by

launching campaign against the designs of a

foreign magazine that conspired to insult a

patriot Narendra Modi. He loves the C word in

any case.UTS

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