The Solicitor General of a free sovereign democratic republic tells the Supreme Court of the country at the time of the largest and the severest humanitarian crisis faced by the nation since independence that only those people may question the government who can prove to the honourable court that they have already done what they are asking the government to do.
He then asks the petitioners to provide such instances of their actions under oath and in writing to the court in the form of a sworn affidavit. That is his ‘Gotcha’ moment where he’s gone one up on his learned opponents in the mental chess that is being played in front of a bench of the Supreme Court of the nation.
Check. And mate.
Except there is one problem: This is not a game.
And I think that while he very well understands the various legal tactics that he uses so effectively to corner his opponents and get his way in the court (even if on video conferencing nowadays), the problem is that either he does not understand how a democracy or indeed any government works, or he does not understand how logic works.
I suspect it is both.
Meanwhile, the father who wails as he mourns his son who died as he begged for milk, the toddler who doesn’t yet know that he is orphaned when his mother died in her sleep on the railway platform and continues to attempt playing peekaboo, and at least 9 other living, breathing humans of flesh & blood, citizens of free India, all of whom died of starvation on the very trains that were to take them home, along with the young man who, as he tried to walk home, had a heart attack a short distance from his destination 200km away, the tired labourers without footwear, the man who was so hungry, he ate roadkill, the little child who was being dragged by her mother even though both of them were dead tired, the desperate men trying to hide inside a cement mixer so they could be smuggled back home, the 15 men, women, and children mowed down by the very train that they were told was not running, and numerous others who are in pain, and need immediate relief as well as a calming hand on their shoulders (along with warm food, a clean toilet, a safe place to sleep, and some money in their pockets, none of it undeserved), all wait for the honourable court to finally direct the honourable Solicitor General to request his honourable client, the government in power in the world’s 4th largest economy, to do the honourable fucking thing and keep some of the honour it earned during its landslide victory fucking intact by saving the very people that fucking elected it and do its fucking job without asking others what they did or without playing any more games.
Sometimes, and these are very rare and usually fleeting, I actually wish there was a just God, if not actually intervening in humanity’s daily affairs, at least meting out punishment to the evil-doers and their apologists.
As an atheist, I don’t believe in either Heaven or Hell, but today is the time I wish at least Hell existed. No, not for the poor, because they are already in it. But for those who are squarely responsible for the Hell that exists here, and for those that defend them and hold their briefs.
Mr.Mehta, you and everyone you are defending, speaking for, and shielding from doing what is right, I have to say this to you: May you all go to Hell!
