CONFUSING INDIA IN 2019

The year ends. It has been dramatic all over the world. The world gets more and more dramatic because we have our phone in our right hand and the computer before us.

And India got dramatically confused.

I am still confused

if the state of Kashmir was much better off with all the terrorist activities in the past many years and with Kashmiri Pandits being mistreated and forced to run away or

better off with the removal of Section 370 removing special status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir with its current leaders under house arrest.

I am still confused

Whether we need those 2000 trees at Aarey Milk Colony or whether we need a lifelong metro for Mumbai city.

That confused me further on 

Why Mumbai citizens were quite when the Aarey colony over the years reduced to two-thirds of its 3,262-acre space due to land allotment to the Zoo, Film City and Housing projects. Where did its original vision of supplying good quality and affordable milk to Mumbai citizens disappear?  We missed the wood for the trees!

I am still confused

How the current government is responsible for the all-time low GDP growth and unemployment when the previous government left a mess of the banking sector which is the lifeline for the economy and poured black money into the real-estate sector which then became a big contributor to the GDP.

I am still confused

Whether a corrupt leader is better for our country or a so called Hinduvta/dictatorial leader? But we have to make hard choices. 

But most of all I am confused on

Whether India has learnt a new word secular or was it already there in its dictionary?

I, a Hindu, grew up in the 80s, studying in a convent school, reciting the phrase “name of the father, the son and the Holy spirit” every morning and we children and our parents never had to be throttled with the word secular. In around 2010, my driver who stayed in the slum Dharavi, told me that for years Hindus and Muslims lived there in harmony but not anymore. Ditto for the state of Kerala where so many communities lived together in harmony for years.

I am thoroughly confused on

How come the youth of India who earlier never looked up from their gadgets and had not a care in the world with parents rolling on the red carpet and mostly never bothered who ruled us and what they did, suddenly woke up to Citizen Amendment Bill protests. Did the teachers teach them a new meaning of the word secular?

As I was ending the article, I just read what a foreign journalist wrote on 

Twitter

Terrifying video of India's fascist Hindutva paramilitary group the RSS holding a massive march in the southern state of Telangana. The world's largest fascist movement is in India. It is ideologically very extreme; RSS founders were influenced by Nazism. One of the early leaders of India's fascist RSS paramilitary, MS Golwalkar, wrote a book in 1939 praising Hitler and saying Nazi Germany's "purity" by "purging the country of Semitic races" was a "good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by"

Now I am thoroughly confused. I am wondering if we will soon see concentration camps? I am wondering how is it that somebody who says something 80 years back holds true even today?

So I wonder and wonder who has made India unsecular, fascist and dictatorial.

I go into 2020 quite confused.

Happy New Year