Emergency was reprehensible, as is what’s been happening since 2014 – By Manish Tewari
The internal Emergency imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was more than just an error of judgement. She herself admitted as much…. However, what has been happening since May 2014 is equally reprehensible. India is living in a state of an undeclared Emergency.
The fourth BJP government at the Centre has renewed the project to rewrite the constitutional “idea of India”…. The NDA/BJP regime has perpetrated a full-fledged assault on pluralistic mores that characterise the Indian way of life. Campaigns around “love jihad” and “ghar wapasi” have kept social polarisation on a slow but continuous burn. Government apologists even rationalise communal lynchings…. Institutional subversion is the norm….
With large sections of the media already neutered and the rest sought to be reined in through delegated legislation targeted at social media intermediaries and courageous outliers in the electronic media, an Orwellian state has been created. Every person has been coerced to install a censor in his head for the fear that any honest opinion can lead to punitive action, ranging from trolling to spine-chilling reprisals under a repressive legal panoply. If this is not an undeclared Emergency, what else would you call it?
