I have said this once and I will say this again: Which group is oppressed and which one is oppressive keeps changing as power equations change, sometimes over millennia, sometimes overnight. That said, when one gets power, one must remember that how one uses that power reveals one’s character more than any other word or action of oneself. And no one, least of all politicians, is going to let the laws and systems, created by their oppressors when they were in power, out of their hands. Whether it was Nehru who either refused to or failed to dismantle the extractive nature of colonial Indian administration, or Indira who introduced and (ab)used various draconian provisions against the opposition and indeed the people themselves, or the UPA who formulated and wielded UAPA against its detractors, or the current regime which has infiltrated and taken over the very institutions of secular democracy to serve their (not the nation’s) interests, or the potential future government that will replace them, nobody will ever give up the concentration of discretionary and oppressive power created by their predecessors. In fact, they’ll gleefully use it against the opposition and the very people who elected them hoping that they’d be different.
The rule is simple: When out of power, seek refuge in the constitution and denounce those who abuse it as anti-national; when in power, abuse the constitution and denounce those who seek refuge in it as anti-national.
A simple formula. The trouble isn’t that the self-serving politicians use it. The trouble is the naïve and gullible public buy their side of the story every single time.
Supriya Sule ji, I am disappointed. Not just because of the reasons stated above, but also because of how you have appointed yourself as the purveyor of ‘Marathi culture’, whatever that is and how you have closed ranks with your opposition politicians not for any issue of national or state interest, but on the issue of what is (to me) a tasteless poem by an irrelevant person on social media. Indeed, I will be surprised if the courts don’t treat this as someone exercising their freedom of expression. There was no call to violence, there was no incitement to violence, and there was nothing illegal in fact about that poem except that it was vomit-inducing to some (including you, and me, if I may say so). To make an example of a powerless individual so as to send a message to others just because you control the police reflects on your character, and frankly, on the character of the father who you claim to be doing this for. A sad day for democracy indeed. And coming from you, who has been positioning herself as a stalwart statesperson, speaking with reasoned articulation in the Parliament, bringing your constituency’s issues to the fore, working for the people who sent you to represent them in Delhi, and being a voice of sanity and reasonableness, this is, without doubt, a shock to me. I really do not know how I will take you for your word again.
P.S: This once again reaffirms my faith in Rahul Gandhi as someone who walks the talk. His empathy and concern for even his father’s convicted, proven killers is so refreshingly different from the feelings you seem to harbour against someone who merely wished your father died in a figurative, poetic way.
