Volume 5, No. 6, June 2004

G. Fellows

The elections are just over where fantasy had replaced the real world. You are asked to forget the last five years at least and get set to give another go to the rulers. Forget that you have been through barbaric times in Gujarat or ever needed a decent way of life because a mandir can look after all of your basic material needs. Forget that you live in one of the worst places in the world because the exploding of an atomic bomb has pushed India into the club of elite nations and it is a matter of great satisfaction. Forget the bowl in the hand and just think that you are great and the most contented people in the world.

These are post-modem times where everything is fed on illusions. Here the real and the nether world transmute and go together at the same time. The ancient blends with the post-modernist. The idea reigns supreme and you can call white black and black white. Never mind if you are told that intolerant Hinduism is the only tolerant religion in the world. Here you can trample all democratic norms under foot and still call yourself the biggest democrat. The criminals can pose as saints and war makers can parade themselves as peacemakers. The rulers can rule in the name of people and still burn and kill them with impunity. You are told that all unbelievable things must be believed. These are election times and also new times.

You could not have gas cylinders for blasting human beings in olden days. Buddhists burned in their Matths during Sankracharya’s times may stop convulsing in their graves after hearing about the infernos of Gujarat. It is a new method of putting men, women and children to fire. The Hindu cultural ‘greatness’ is reviving in its new incarnation, in Safron Frenzy of the twenty-first century. Burning the dead is old fashioned. Burn them alive and, on a mass scale. This is how the ancient glory of a religion called Hinduism is being revived in ‘post-modem’ times. So rest assured, the barbarities and Irarbarians no longer remain restricted to the barbaric ages. They come calling in the twenty-first century and get you through the cell-phones and internet networks and may soon make way for Matrix movies to go into oblivion. Hitler had to build specially designed massive gas chambers but the Hindu revivalists betray the power to turn every household into one. It is a great advance in science and technology, it is vedic too. You can burn everything and everyone in the havan kund and still claim to be religious. The last five years have done everything to revive the horrors the saffron monster is capable of.

Feel Good! That is the message from 7 Race Course. The Prime Minister is at your door, ringing and knocking. Answer him if you please. The machine does the calling and tries to manipulate and play with the minds of the living. You have been having this kind of thing even in the past. But now it is a bit different and quite post-modernist.

These are high tech times and new methods are being devised to brainwash and impart you a sense of closeness with the rulers who have never been anywhere near to you. Or, have they been? We doubt it. You too will. If you have any misgivings (about this doubt) then ask the odd one lakh families of Yamuna Pushta slums in Delhi whose houses have recently been bulldozed because the capital city does not look nicer with their unpleasant presence on the banks of the sacred Yamuna which stinks like a ganda nala or is worse. They need a clean Yamuna but before that they need a city beautiful free from the hungry, filthy and the miserable. Anyway, these uprooted and agonised people will tell you how close they live to the rulers of this land and how far away they really are. But the high tech propaganda blitz asks the homeless to feel at home and believe that they are close to their destroyers. You will congratulate the rulers for this kind of nicety which asks the people to see no evil, to hear no evil, and to speak no evil. Feel good even if you don’t have good from your rulers. There is nothing ‘metaphysical’ about it.

It is a multi-pronged strategic exercise that involves rath yatras, sports, media excitement blitz and big money from the state exchequer. Send the message hard and strong and with all the Goebbelsian trappings that India is shining and the credit for this spin would automatically go into the coffers of the BJP and the NDA. The government spent Rs. 400 crores for this media bombardment The money extracted from people’s pockets is being used to wobble their heads. "Get thrashed with your own stick!" that is what they intend to do.

Vajpayee’s vice admiral’s Bharat Uday juggernaut has traveled thousands of miles. Have a look on the newspapers or just switch on the idiot screen you will find gasoline propelled modern chariots accompanied by screeching cavalcades full of sycophants, government attendants, robots like security guards and media clowns holding the people on the roads to ransom. At many places you can see people having sickening experiences endless traffic hold ups enacted by these bigwigs’ caravans. Thousands of tons of grime and gas have polluted the atmosphere. These events are not reported in the media. The shine has to be forced upon the indifferent minds and faceless crowds. Feel shiny and cheery with shining Cherry Blossom in one hand and bubbling Coke in the other. BJP’s Bharat is Rising after Mera Bharat Mahaan of the Congress bit the dust. Gujarat became the new horizon in the West from where the gory saffron sun arose.

If the rath yatras are proving disgusting for the common man they have other channels to have them feel good. Give them Indo-Pak cricket and clean bowled them. It is far far easier and effective. This weapon has more power than the nauseating propaganda about NDA’s (mis)achievements. Cricket, after all, is a game and it will be quite difficult to detect the election politics running wild between the wickets. Replace Musharraf for Shoaib and Vajpayee for Sachin, or Vajpayee bowling to Musharraf, both in the persons of Kaif and lnzmam respectively and you will get an idea.

The neighbouring governments which were ready to nuke each other a year and a half ago are now playing on the cricket pitch and collaborating under the Samsung banner to dupe their own people with a pseudo sense of peace and friendship. The cricket fever has been calculatedly built up. The newspapers are devoting four to eight pages daily shooting the fever high with mercury soaring to unprecedented heights. There is no place in the newspapers for the problems the people are facing and their wretched conditions of life. Remember the emergency days and the fate of mehngayee maar gayee song of Roti, Kapda aur Makaan. Disgusting views of the stark realities of millions upon millions of people are banned from the sight. Everywhere India is depicted as shining, bubbling, rising and soaring through the bat and ball. These are election times and Vajpayee needs another flyer. These are not days of sixers as it is politics and not cricket; you can call it election-cricket or Elecricket, if you must. The cricket bat has been turned into a hammer to crack skulls and spoil brains, The victory in the series will help amass votes for making the people feel good by thrashing Pakistan on its home turf. Not a costly affair when compared to a war on the icy peaks and barren glaciers! We find that the newspapers which are critical of the NDA and the BJP have become willing slaves in this pre-ordained game of twisted wickets.

Celebrate victory! The outcome of the tour is already decided in the umpires’ rooms at the Vajpayees’ 7 Race Course and the General’s presidential palace in Pakistan. A Punjabi newspaper brought out a story from inside the PM’s office predicting the result of every match in the one day series. Every match ended the way as predicted. At ‘decisive movements’ one could see the ugliness of the sport spirit in the form of seamless seamers, dull bouncers, and lustreless fielding. The forty days cricket extravaganza is just a prank. Get engrossed in cricket for forty days and feel good and forget the deprivations, suicides, starvation deaths, millions of job losses and carnages of the past five years. They are trying to bowl out the common Indians for a duck.

It is cricket after a long innings of nuking threats and of would be dreadful consequences. Take an hour out from the forty days of trance, go to the polling booth, cast the vote, and thus perform the highest political duty in a democracy in a slapdash manner.

They have been blowing hot… and turning cold at the behest of their common master, the Yankees. We have been hearing the same Indian leaders saying that Pakistan was a failed state and should be bombed out of existence. That not only the freedom struggle of Kashmir must be vilified and crushed, the creation of Pakistan itself has to be undone because there has to be only one nation and not two. When this tirade is repeated time and again the nations of the North East, the Punjabis, the Tamils, the Telugus, the Bengalis and numerous others living in this sub-continent convulse and quiver, fearing identity slaughter. They see a non-existent Hindu Nation gobbling up a multi-national prison house. And we cannot imagine what the people of Pakistan think when they see the Hindu communalist beast yelling at them while at the same time licking the boots of the US imperialist monster. The nexus is obvious for the whole world to see. But now it is time to feel good and rant the air with slogans of Indo-Pak friendship till the next round of nuke and missile threats commence.

Musharraf is helping Vajpayee to wash off the Gujarat "blot" with this politically dirty game of cricket. The dictator must be invited again, this time to address the parliament and receive the Bharat Rattan, because it is with his assistance that "Indian democracy" has found an opportunity to bounce and dance. Who said that whenever Pakistan was ruled by a dictator India bashing was its first priority, that the Pakistani dictators have been an instrument for war against India! Vajpayee knows that it is bullshit and India knows when to launch a war and when to cricket together.

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