UTOPIAN DREAMS IN DYSTOPIAN ERA

BACK in the USSR, they had a formula for staying out of trouble: “Don’t think. If you must think, don’t speak. If you must speak, don’t write. If you must write, don’t sign. If you must sign, be prepared.”

- PRATIK KANJILAL

That's practical advice for several contemporary democracies that are giving the least awful form of government a bad name. It’s a dangerous trend because if the gap between democracy and absolutism narrows, people may no longer see the point of the endless struggle to gain and retain freedoms.

The uproars over four recent developments say that we are far from that nadir of apathy. The first is the update to income tax law that allows the agencies to breach citizens’ digital privacy on the basis of suspicions alone yet another instance of the time-honoured Indian tradition of making the process the punishment. And since digital accounts will be examined, it is yet another nail in the coffin of internet privacy and social media.

Moving on, no one knows how many assets were downed in the brief India-Pakistan aerial conflict, but we know for certain that Siddharth Varadarajan and Karan Thapar, prominent journalists with The Wire, are collateral damage. A BJP functionary accused The Wire’s coverage of undermining “sovereignty, unity, and integrity”, which conveniently attracted the attention of Section 152 of the decolonised Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which is the sedition law. The three trigger words are of such variable meaning that the law could be used to Kafkaesque effect to target almost anyone.