Image: The Telegraph, India
You know what’s funny though: Each of those migrant workers desperately trying to get home to what they think is safety (from hunger as much as illness) and each of those privileged assholes who are mocking them (over social media provided by the broadband that is available comfortably in their posh homes) are united by one very specific action in 2024 that I can and will predict right now: They will all vote BJP because they want Modi as their PM.
That regardless of whether we have millions of infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths or whether we escape the fate of other populations across the world by some miracle, whether the state CMs like Udhhav and Mamta show their true leadership as the central government dithers, hesitates, backtracks, denies, procrastinates, dismisses, and overreacts based on whether the date is odd or even or whether Modi invites PC, MMS, et al to form a national government, whether the pseudo stimulus that simply reuses the same schemes already available to the poor to announce them as if they are some new discovery are actually delivered or an entirely fresh and massive package is announced and implemented with gusto, whether the HM disappears when law & order is our second largest priority (after healthcare) or if he is personally present in the war room 24×7, whatever happens, Modi will claim, and be given, the credit for all that works and suffer absolutely no blame for anything that doesn’t. In effect, ‘Ayega To Modi Hi’.
It’s funny to say this about a man who accused his predecessor of wearing a raincoat while showering. We now know who the real Mr. Teflon has always been. No one is better positioned to tell the nation about the importance of washing their hands. No, really. You got to admit that the last joke was funny. Like the whole situation.
Actually, scratch that. It isn’t funny. None of it is, in fact. It’s tragic. But like the world’s best comics, once you take comedy to the extreme, it automatically becomes a tragedy. Just ask Sir Charles Chaplin. Or Robin Williams. Or even our local P L Deshpande. The line between what’s funny and what’s sad is very thin at its extreme. And it is on that very line that this realisation stands.
