The British must be laughing in their sleeves. Three centuries ago, they had to come here to loot us. Now they have their faithful and obliging agents –Mallyas, Modis, et al- who will do the job for them and park the booty in London and live like Oriental Potentates. Now we learn that about 23000 millionaires have left India since 2014, with all their (and, who knows, our) hard earned wealth to overseas havens.

We make a virtue of being naïve. We refuse to even wonder if there is a connection between the Rs. 52.5 lakh crore non-performing assets our banks have created in the service of India, and the Rs. 90 lakh crores of black money that Modi said he would bring home to us within hundred days of his ascension to the throne, enriching each one of us by Rs.15 lakhs. Some of us who believed him, and spent that money in anticipation, are staring down the barrel of bankruptcy. Of course, being decent people, we don’t talk about it.

Some of the top industrialists in India –the corporate giants- owe lakhs of crores to the banks. The list is headed, reportedly, by the Ambanis. Banks now serve mostly as wonder-machines in which the common man’s lifetime savings are converted into goodies for the corporates. The developmental sheen our country now flaunts has the ugly underbelly of treachery and injustice to the common man. Billionaires are created by robbing a billion people of their meagre savings. What used to be called “private” wealth –your savings- has been converted –even as you slept in ignorant bliss- into the wealth of some wily blokes. Small wonder they live life king-size!

Consider how it works. Through regulations, and calibrated blows, the State makes it impossible for you to keep even a tiny part of your private wealth in cash or gold with you. You are arm-twisted into casting all you have into the bottomless pit of banks. With that you lose all control over your own survival kits. Top banking officials –among them several white collar-criminals- in cahoots with political big-wigs and a select band of corporate bandicoots, whittle that away to destinations we have no idea of. For all practical purposes banks are becoming black holes.What should astonish all of us is the impunity bankers enjoy. Massive crimes are committed. Nobody asks them a question. They thrive. Some small fries are serenaded for a while. We hear precious little thereafter.

Those who are doing this silent, cancerous atrocity on us are past masters in the art of diversion and deflection. For all of us, the foremost issue is –and must always be- the mega cesspools of corruption in the banking sector that push us to the brink of destitution. But that is not the case. I cannot help the thought that the avalanche of sensational events -including horrendous crimes- may well have a reference to the need to keep the people on the false scent. This is the classic opium of the people. No one knows what has hit them. No one even seems to want to know what is happening! Great!

Perhaps the most potent opium is the rhetoric of our Prime Minister. Remember how he doused the fire in the wake of demonetization? He wept. He presented himself to the people as the ultimate victim. He sacrificed everything, even his family, he said, for all of us. And we are dealing unfairly with him. Stone-hearted as I am, even I could not hold my tears at all this. In retrospect, it is clear to everyone who has followed the demonetization trajectory that it was nothing but a ploy to sweep the last penny from our hands into the banks, given that they had become bankrupt and had to be re-capitalized so that the NiravModis of this world don’t suffer any inconvenience.

In the last four years all we have had is politics as performance. Or, politics as theatre. So, we have been led from one scene to another. Many scenes, plots and sub-plots have been played out. We morphed gradually into passive and pathetic spectators. Anything and everything has been done to us. Our will or interests or wellbeing did not matter. We were told at every stage that we were being led into a brave, bold, brilliant world. Nothing good ever happen before 2014. Here on, nothing wrong can happen. Congratulations!

Surely, it is to Modi’s advantage that We are a sentimental, hero-worshipping people for whom oratory is an unfailing means of enchantment. For us a word well-spoken today -the right intonation, an over-plus of emotional massala, a flurry of theatrical gestures, an assortment of tonal variations- is more appealing than our welfare tomorrow. We are eager and happy to be charmed. So, we shall not lack charmers.

Yet, we continue to pray, tamaso ma jyotirgamaya. Lead us from darkness to light.

Let us pray diligently. Pray hard. Pray with broken hearts. Pray in the public square. Beat our breasts. Tear our hair. Pray without ceasing. Oh, please. Pray!