What a situation we have in the country today! A week ago I was in Mumbai on a short trip, ruminating on how the city looked a bit sadder than it had when I saw it a year ago. Then the fire happened at Girgaum Chowpatty during a Make in India related cultural programme and from loud cheers that there were no casualties, there were all those terrible fears confirmed about short cuts and inefficiencies. The pollution came back from the Deonar burning ground or atmospheric inversion or just one more curse of an industrialised life and I sniffled my way out of my favourite city.

As it turned out, Mumbai’s problems weren’t the biggest in the nation. Suddenly, we were faced with much worse. Students were being projected as anti-national, an escalation of what we saw with Rohith Vemula. Any opinion that went against the government at the Centre met an enormous cacophony of jingoism. The armed forces were being used as a measure to decide on which actions and statements were patriotic or not. Journalists and a student in custody were beaten up for doing their duty — by lawyers, no less — even as the police watched. The videos that supposedly proved students at Jawaharlal Nehru University were traitors, turned out to be fake.