The Enemy Within

Tragedy and absurdity are today the sun and the moon on our mediascape. On Gandhi's 150th birth anniversary, India's largest-selling English daily carried a full front-page ad for Bard of Blood, a gory revenge war film streaming on Netflix. It surprised very few. Some of our top academics, artists, social workers, lawyers, human rights and civil liberties activists and senior Opposition leaders have been charged with sedition for raising questions about the state of affairs.

Many still languish behind bars, their bail pleas refused more than once. At the same time, several who were jailed for mob lynching, and rapists said to be close to big political leaders, have been bailed out and the complainants put behind bars instead. We are becoming more and more vulnerable each day because a party enjoying a brute majority in Parliament is permitting the ancient sword of history