On May 26, the Modi government completed three years and there have been various celebrations all over the country highlighting the great imaginary achievements of the government.
The illusion that has been created and propagated is that the country is moving toward great prosperity which it did not have all these years. There is a whole propaganda team at work creating the illusion of everything is well, everything is better. This government has been great in image creation and creating illusions. Many TV channels are sold out to the Modi government.
Looking at random, one gets the impression that there is not much to celebrate, but a feeling that everything is not in order. Discrimination and violence against Dalit and Adivasi communities are widespread. There has been centralization; the prime minister is everything; the cabinet seems to have disappeared in fact. One does not hear anything about the cabinet or any of the ministers. It is all Modi and Modi alone matters.
Protests by farmers have increased in many parts of the country; they are suppressed everywhere; again many lives have been lost through police firing. The number of farmer suicides has gone up during these years. Most of the protests have been underplayed, given no publicity. The media seems to be completely sold out to the Modi government.
The Central government took an unprecedented step in November 2016, namely, demonetization. The government has praised the move as very positive; however, the government is unable to provide any reasonable argument for having taken such a drastic step without enough preparation and consultation. A majority of the country’s marginalized population, such as Dalits, Adivasis and fisher folk who depend on cash for their daily needs have been very badly affected. These people, who belong to the labor class and subsist on daily wages, have suffered a lot due to demonetization.
Demonetization has worsened the economic situation of the country. The media simply ignored the job loss, wage losses and the hardships the people had to undergo. No one talks about the number of people who lost their lives by standing in line at the banks.
What is becoming evident to everyone is the growing influence of the multi-national corporations on government policies. The environment ministry has been granting clearances to many mining projects in environmentally sensitive areas without following proper procedures and ignoring the objections by the local people.
What is obvious is the rise of the Hindutva forces in the country and the centralization of the cow. Real concerns like joblessness, the increasing number of rapes and murder of women, attacks on Dalits, the agonizing cry of the farmers, all these receive hardly any attention from the government; but the cow has become the rallying point in the country. The Hindutva forces are becoming so assertive that we can no more hope for a country which is religiously, culturally and linguistically pluralistic, growing based on the values of the Indian Constitution.
(Jesuit Father Joseph Mattam is the founder and dean of the Jesuit Regional Seminary in Vadodara (Baroda), Gujarat. He is a regular invitee to speak at national and international forums on religious issues. His forte is writing on Theological and Scriptural issues.)
