Big Week

March 26, 2024

 

            It’s been a big week. I’ve been home a week now and I feel like a crustacean, more specifically a crab, who had lost its shell, it’s exoskeleton, its protection, but now is growing one again. Well, I feel like I am crawling back into mine, but this apartment is a new home still, in many ways, and maybe I am growing into it. I know earlier I would have compared what I am feeling to a snake molting but somehow that doesn’t fit right.

            I always equated snakes shedding their skins with transformation, so I wonder why it doesn’t feel right. Maybe because I don’t feel like I am transforming? Though I want to. 

            Big week indeed. I felt happy being home. I did things that I hadn’t done in the other spaces I lived most of my days since 2004 began. I started on the rehab of my injured thigh. I took a walk in the park. I visited the library and sketched. A library is a nice place to practice sketching people as people are mostly still there, at least more than they are in a café, but maybe less than they are in a bus or train where most people have one hand and both eyes glued to their phones. 

            So, I was happy. Until Friday. 

            I woke Friday with a sore throat, feeling low, and crawly, like I just wanted to stay close to the floor and creep around all day. I wondered what had happened to my ‘happy’ and then it sunk in. It had been a big week in Indian politics and on Thursday night (the time in Singy being two and a half hours later than in Delhi) Arvind Kejriwal, the Chief Minister of Delhi, had been detained and taken into custody by the Enforcement Directorate. 

            It was the same day that the SBI, the largest state bank in India, had provided the data from the electoral bonds after trying to hide it for a week or two, despite the judgment directing them to disclose it, and being told by the Supreme Court to meet this deadline and file an affidavit that they had provided every bit of information they had. 

            Modi followers would call this detention co-incidence. They’d say the ED works separately from the Government. But the data from the Electoral Bonds had already revealed it otherwise. Clear trails of ED raids followed by huge donations to the ruling party had been discovered by reporters and analysts as soon as the data was made public. The electoral bonds scheme had been challenged, soon after it was introduced, by three or four groups that believed the bonds to be unconstitutional. But it had taken years for the Apex Court to hear the case and make this judgment. 

            Many of us breathed relief when this judgment had come. The BJP leaders and supporters used India Today’s — a media group funded heavily the Government — conclave to lie about the scheme, the donations received, and the figures. Unfortunately ground reports by U-tubers showed at least initially that the public believed this misinformation. 

            So yes, by Friday evening I connected my low mood to political happenings and how despite such a huge judgment nothing felt changed politically. 
            Kejriwal’s detention was reported worldwide. A friend from the US knew about it. But the freezing of accounts of another major opposition party, other arrests of political leaders,  judges resigning from their posts and promptly joining the ruling party — all in the months leading to National elections, didn’t make the news, not internationally and not in India either. If it wasn’t for these U-tubers I follow I wouldn’t know what was happening in the mother of democracy that I am a citizen of. 

            I watched the U-tubers all weekend and I languished doing nothing else. I did make it to karate, and I taught my lessons but my eyes, ears, and heart were glued to U-tube. Even the steady rhythm of reading I had built up broke down, and eventually I came down with a fever Sunday night. Assault of little bacteria on my body or the outside happenings on my mind and soul? 

            Some of us if we haven’t become believers or silent accepters of this tyranny may feel more ill than usual during this time. We desperately seek news and what we hear and see makes us ill for we also know that despite all this the BJP will win at least this year. All we can hope is that they don’t sweep. 

             Last week I wrote about the believers and silent accepters that citizens become, which Avay Shukla had described in his new book. It stayed with me because there is the third category which he didn't mention, the ones who analyze — despite the sea of misinformation, despite the numbing the sheer display of corruption and power brings, and express. We think, we don’t believe, and we are not silent. Some have U-tube channels, some write articles, some give speeches, and some like me who don’t have an audience still type away on our desks hoping a few people will read and become aware of the happenings, think a bit more, and maybe express something despite the net of fear cast wide by the ruling party. I am interested in understanding this third category.

            And last night when I could not sleep, I watched another U-tube channel's ground interviews. People would not name the party, people wouldn’t express clearly, at first refusing to speak at all, their arms hugging their bodies tight, but then when the interviewer probed further many dared an opinion. They spoke of the real issues, unemployment, and rising prices not religion which the ruling party is hoping to frame the election around. They were disillusioned, hopeless, sad. They said all political parties give speeches but there is nobody that cares of the poor and everyone is corrupt. It broke my heart. 

            One man who was more vocal was asked to name the issues, the parties, more clearly but he refused. They will watch and they will come beat me up, he said. We all knew who 'they' were. The BJP had grown a force of thugs on the ground for just this. 
            I feel no optimism that all this will turn the tide, the BJP wave is too huge. But I can observe and see the little changes and things that don’t change despite big news. It is a film, a Bollywood film, of the nexus of money and power unfolding, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. 

            As I have been saying I need the discipline of not going down the rabbit hole of constant news watching. I need it so I can get on with my own life. I still feel a bit crippled with things, unable to maintain focus on other things, but I need discipline now. I think I will start with trying to get back into healthy eating and rehabbing my thigh more consistently and hope that one kind of discipline might help me not slip up so much in other areas. And I seem to be disciplined about writing this Tuesday blog.