Time to call out the hypocrisy of the woke ecosystem

Tragedy is that loudest champions of tolerance have become intolerant. Those who claim to defend inclusion now practise exclusion.

- SANTISHREE DHULIPUDI PANDIT

Another week with a familiar scene: a protest ivertised as a “harmless” campaign for clean air at India Gate, but behind the scenes, the same woke hypocrisy. A Delhi court had to send several so-called “environmental activists” to custody after investigators found links between them and the banned radical Maoist outfit, as videos allegedly connected them to networks long involved in Naxalite mobilisation. This episode of the so-called air pollution protest was never about the smog in Delhi, but reflective of a sinister trend wherein malicious actors are relaying and smuggling sympathies for a radical agenda behind the camouflage of a civic cause.

If pollution was their genuine concern, one wonders where this outrage was during the AAP government years, when Delhi's air quality dipped to some of its worst levels. Not a whisper then. Because the pollution was never the issue, but a convenient mask for another ritual performance of anti-state activism, driven by an obsession with demonising Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the NDA government. These sloganeers were not suffering citizens gasping for air, but self-appointed “revolutionaries” who treat every national challenge as a chance to wage ideological war.