Recently, there has been a lot of ‘concern’ flying around in India about the state of our democracy. From the Leftist ‘intellectuals’ sermonizing to fawning, unquestioning lit-fest crowds, to the fatwa-issuing mullahs and the letter writing Padres, everyone’s warning the Indian citizenry about how endangered our democracy and constitution are. We can expect to see a lot more of this concern in the run-up to the next general election. After all, this is a fight whose outcome could decide the survival of these breaking India forces after the Modi government has choked their foreign funding channels. Despite their motivations, it is true that our democracy is going through a very challenging period as it is being deformed far away from the one that had promised equality, fraternity and justice. But the assault on our democratic rights is not due to Prime Minister Modi and his party, as the Leftists and their media lapdogs want us to believe, but by those being propped up as his challengers.
The world has witnessed enough news and images from Bengal where election candidates belonging to opposition parties, particularly BJP, were assaulted, even murdered and raped, by the goons from Mamata Banerjee’s TMC to prevent them from filing nominations and contesting the panchayat elections in the state recently. Of course, this isn’t as an assault on our democracy, the Leftists would want us Indians to believe. The denial of suffrage is just a small price that needs to be paid for protecting ‘secularism’. While the Leftists control Bengal through a franchise, there is another state, Kerala, where they operate directly through Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) led Left Democratic Front (LDF). So the intensity of abuses on the spirit and process of democracy is that much greater there but gets very little coverage in the national discourse. Should be the tyranny of distance! Incidents such as this and this targeting the left’s political opponents are a daily occurrence in the state. I will highlight here just two incidents that occurred in the last few days to explain how these fascists in Kerala operate.
Veena George is a member of the Kerala assembly representing Aranmula constituency. Till the day before she became a CPI(M) candidate for the assembly elections, she was a ‘journalist’. Now the mainstream media wants us all to believe that they are the only and ultimate defenders of democracy in this country. So, it is natural to expect that when someone from that line of work becomes a legislator, she would go the extra mile to defend the democratic rights, if not of the entire country, at least of her constituents. Far from that, George has a consistent history of using her position of power and access to police through her membership of the ruling dispensation to harass anyone daring to highlight her failure to deliver as an MLA. Sometime back, she had used the state police to harass a Congress party activist because he questioned the corruption of those close to her. In the latest episode, she got a BJP activist arrested because he had ventured to highlight in a Facebook post about the pathetic condition of the bus depot in the MLA’s constituency. Moreover, the MLA charged in her complaint that the particular Facebook comment incites inter-religious conflict, all because there was a reference to her proximity to the Church. Mind you, it is well known in Kerala that George’s election candidature was courtesy heavy lobbying (read blackmail) by the Orthodox Church and a Padre’ was seen dancing in joy on the stage during her victory celebrations.
The second incident involves K. B. Ganesh Kumar, an MLA belonging to a constituent party of the LDF, Kerala Congress (B). Mr. Kumar is the son of a longtime politician and multiple-time state minister, R. Balakrishna Pillai, and is a former movie actor. He is also well known in the state for his brash and aggressive public behavior. Having been born into political power, he goes around acting like a feudal lord rather than a public servant. The latest episode of his rowdy actions involves assaulting a young man and his mother because his car was not accorded the right of first passage on a public road. Not satisfied with that, the dis-honorable MLA even registered a case against the young man. And once again, the LDF government machinery in Kerala sided with their MLA, not with law and justice.
Have you ever heard of a public representative that gets her constituents arrested for demanding such a basic civic amenity as a bus stand? or of a public representative who assaults his constituents and registers cases against them, all because his car did not get a passage? You wouldn’t, because such assault on the public’s democratic rights and civil liberties in the service of the party and its leadership happens only under a communist regime and Kerala is the only state remaining in India where these fascists still have an ability to undermine the democracy. But not for long.
