Is anyone, anywhere, maintaining a running list of what a saner, genuinely constitutional government will have to undo once this regime is finally seen out?
I would very much like to believe that the INC (or at least someone adjacent to constitutional seriousness) has a dedicated cell tracking decisions such as VB G-RAM-G, Agniveer, the emasculation of the CEC selection process, and the steady procedural vandalism of institutions that were, unfortunately, not designed to resist executive capture. Alongside this, there must also exist a parallel register of collaborators (individuals who, in full knowledge and with deliberate intent, have broken both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution to enable untrammelled rule). This list would necessarily include names like Gyanesh Kumar, along with judges, police officers, journalists, and senior officials who have consciously participated in the subversion of law rather than its defence.
Not out of vengeance, but because accountability is the only language power understands.
When constitutional normalcy returns (and it will), there must be a mechanism (a tribunal, a commission, whatever form the law permits, even if it takes the form of a neutral body created by an Act of Parliament) through which these actions are examined and these individuals are called to account. Democracies do not heal by pretending nothing happened. They heal by naming what happened and who enabled it.
The immediate trigger for this anxiety was the now-familiar pattern: a rumour, initially vehemently denied (but quietly circulated through the IT Cell to gauge the mood of the bhakts and the pushback from those who still retain sanity), followed by sudden fait accompli legislation rushed through the house by bypassing the opposition and with the help of the very institutions whose task is to prevent such haste. This time, the proposed removal of Gandhiji’s portrait from currency notes, to be replaced by “Bharat Mata” was the one that got me writing this.
And about that: I have no objection to the removal of Gandhiji’s image from currency. If anything, he would have been the first to recoil at the idea of his likeness sanctifying money. The introduction of his image in the mid-1990s was itself deeply uncomfortable to people like me, and one could argue that there is no greater insult to that man than to have his moral authority pressed into the service of commerce.
That is not what troubles me.
What horrifies me is what they wish to replace it with.
This regime’s conception of “Bharat Mata” has nothing to do with Abanindranath Tagore’s 1905 visualisation (lyrical, ascetic, plural). It will be the kitschy, militarised caricature favoured by WhatsApp forwards and Bollywood art directors. A garish iconography that implicitly gestures towards “Akhand Bharat”, casually swallowing neighbours, offending SAARC countries, antagonising China, and quite deliberately excluding Indian Muslims (and no, this is not suspicion; this is the entire point).
Currency is not decoration. It is the most ubiquitous state document in circulation. Every symbol placed on it is a declaration of who belongs, who does not, and what the state imagines itself to be.
That is why this matters.
I am not naïve enough to believe that every institutional deformation can be reversed, or that the logistics of undoing a decade of damage will be simple. But the knowledge that someone, somewhere, is keeping a list (carefully, methodically, without hysteria) would help.
Because knowing that memory exists is sometimes the only thing that allows one to sleep.
