Voter is the Victor

ELECTION 2024 quelled some doubts that have been playing on many of our minds, especially in the last 10 years.

- Satish Padmanabhan

Doubts like whether we are inherently communal as a people, and all this talk of unity in diversity, anekta mein ekta, taught to us in civics classes in school are just a veneer we put on, just like the algebra and the periodic table we learnt and forgot as our skins thickened. Whether the idea of secularism drilled into us by the freedom fighters, our forefathers, and our Constitution is just an artificial construct which started to develop cracks after being forced to stand on a shaky foundation for over 70 years. Questions arose in the mind about whether the insistence that we are a peace-loving, democracy-cherishing people is only for podium speeches and seminar lectures, when in reality we long for an authoritarian regime bent upon making us all ‘One’. Whether deep down we feel press freedom and human rights violations be damned as long as direct benefit transfer and the stock market are chugging along nicely.