A vindication of power of resistance
Updated On: 07 June, 2024 06:52 AM IST | Mumbai | Rosalyn D`mello
The general election results confirm how individual and collective dissent help keep the spirit of democracy alive
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BJP workers watch the counting of votes for the Lok Sabha election at the party office in New Delhi on June 4. Pic/PTI
Having held back any sensation of hope over the last few weeks for fear of catastrophic disappointment, yesterday, as the Indian election results sunk in, I allowed myself to feel joy and elation. As it became clearer that the spirit of democracy in our country had been saved by those who experience the most precarity, from people who suffer caste discrimination to women in rural areas, I felt overwhelmed and couldn’t stop myself from welling up. I was home alone for a few hours and kept wishing I was back in Delhi with friends with whom I could celebrate this triumph. For it does feel like a triumph, even if the larger outcome is not necessarily what I may have desired. For the first time in a decade, I felt a sense of relief, like a gag had been removed from my mouth and I could speak again. I messaged my best friend. I told her we haven’t even begun to process how oppressive the last ten years have been, particularly given we both work in the media.
Then I made the mistake of turning to Indian news channels to ‘feel the vibe’ and felt assaulted by the tone of sycophancy that continued to pervade, as if none of the journalists had got the brief. The propaganda machine was continuing to churn, with no sign of pausing for reflection or contemplation. It drove home the point that one of the biggest casualties of the political reality we have all lived over the last ten years has been the cauterising of the media and how it was instrumentalised to perform lip service to the ruling party, to be its bitch, to use cruder language. It has been so hard to find ‘real news’, news that isn’t tainted by propaganda, that isn’t coloured by a certain ideological questioning, news that treats readers and viewers like intelligent people with brains rather than puppets.
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