A few days ago, the highest court of India decided that Mr. Prashant Bhushan has, in fewer than 280 letters of the English alphabet, humiliated the august institution so much that the honourable judges cannot carry out their work of dispensing justice with dignity. How sad!
The court has also decided that Bhushan be punished; the quantum of punishment will be announced today.
Mercifully, the law of the land doesn’t allow cutting off the tongue that lashes out against honourable judges. Or giving the owner of the tongue 50 lashes in a public square. So, the disturbed judges will have to be content with imposing a fine or sending the man to jail. They may even show him forgiveness perhaps, cowed down by the deluge of protests from all over the world. Who knows?
Personally, I believe Mr. Prashant Bhushan, who has spent his life as a brilliant civil rights lawyer and exposing corruption in high places (including the 2G and the coal block allotment scams during UPA-2) will be sent to jail today. I will be pleasantly surprised if he isn’t.
If it actually happens, I would feel sorry for him and his family, but I will also be extremely happy. Why?
Because it will tell us, with a sense of finality, that India today is in a situation that in many ways, is similar to our colonial past. That our hard-earned freedom has been usurped by a bunch of uneducated, cunning, ruthless people (mostly men) whose sole political capital is spreading hatred towards Muslims and Christians and creating a false fear among 82% of the population that the remaining 18% will somehow finish them off. Clearly, a lot of people have started believing in this bizarre proposition. In 1857, the British began colonising our land. Since 2014, the Sangh-BJP combine has been colonising our minds with their ideology of hate. They have sucked life out of our democratic institutions. They are extremely incompetent too. In just six years, they managed to destroy our economy even before the COVID-19 struck.
We have two options before us.
We can sheepishly accept a Hindu Pakistan, with its denial of democratic rights, muscular suppression of all dissent, bidding farewell to science and scientific approach to education, and ascendance of Hindu mullahs, all of which have been happening already.
Or we can choose to wage a new freedom struggle to reinvent our democracy and regain the values enshrined in the Constitution of India.
On which side will you be?
Maybe, unknown to you and me, a new freedom struggle has already begun to redeem the soul of our Constitution. Already, a large number of our finest men and women are in jail: from the 80-year-old poet Varavara Rao to the civil rights lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, who gave up her American citizenship and many privileges and gave her life to help poor Adivasis in their legal battles against a repressive state in Chhattisgarh, to the young Pinjra Tod activists, who began their journey to obtain equal rights for girls in Delhi hostels, and went on to protest against the regressive Citizenship Amendment Act.
Just as India could not have become independent without Gandhi, Nehru, and Bose going to jail again and again, I don’t believe India will ever achieve freedom from these internal colonialists without Prashant Bhushan and many others going to jail.
In this new freedom struggle. 20 August 2020 might prove to be a watershed moment in our journey towards a new 15 August 1947.
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