Grew up reading history which told us that my India won her freedom not because an empire weakened, but because ordinary people found extraordinary courage.
One man walked to Dandi. Millions walked with him.
Today, another man sat on a hunger strike and requested a dialogue on the accountability to an entire generation of students.
Instead of dialogue, what we witnessed today is not governance. When an administration relies on the plainclothes policemen and security personnel for an early morning abduction of a peaceful, fasting Sonam Wangchuk from Jantar Mantar, it abdicates its right to be called a government.
A true government is of, by, and for the people – I refuse to call the people who did this that. The current ruling apparatus operates purely for the preservation of its own power and the enrichment of its corporate.
The parallels to the British Raj are no longer hyperbole. When Gandhi went on a hunger strike, even the ruthless East India Company were forced into the theater of dialogue. Today’s ruling party lacks even that colonial courtesy. They do not engage; they erase. They are uncomfortable with conversation itself.
Pre-independence, our forefathers paid lagaan to the English. Today, the tax code has simply been rebranded. The modern version is funneled directly into the pockets of Adani, Ambani, and the tight coterie of oligarchs.
The hypocrisy is staggering. The PM beats the drum of self-reliance, telling people to travel in India, to wed in India. But there’s a glaring omission - he never tells them to study in India!
Why? Because one cannot mandate domestic education when one has utterly failed to build the infrastructure to support it - failure made glaringly obvious by systemic exam leaks that has left millions of students in despair. More than 1.2 million Indian students are currently studying abroad, and the number taking loans to fund that education has nearly tripled in the last decade.
That is the actual wealth we should be trying to stem — and the real brain drain we should be reversing.
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