Aditya Sinha: Out with the Big Brother brigade

Security forces march through Jalandhar Punjab on Saturday The HC pulled up the government in Haryana and at the Centre for failure to stop ensure law and order after the rape conviction of godman Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh PicAFPA most devastating derailment happened last week to the BJPs project of imposing its own idea of uniformity on India when a ninemember bench of the Supreme Court unanimously declared privacy to be a fundamental right Prime Minister Narendra Modi BJP chief Amit Shah and RSS boss Mohan Bhagwat all found their throats parched dry by one profound idea The individual I think therefore I am I alone decide my destiny I am responsible for my actions How meaningfully I participate in society is my choice Community is not absolute but forever calibrated The State is at my service and never the other way around These axioms define what it is to be a human being They define what it means to be alive They define dignityWhen French philosopher Rene Descartes posed Cogito ergo sum he argued that the mere fact of thought was proof enough to establish the existence of the thinker From thought flows agency Thus to control our thoughts the State attempts to become not just the means of an individuals existence but also the ends to which individuals existGeorge Orwells 1948 dystopian novel Nineteen EightyFour illustrates the extreme case of no privacy The characters have no way to express their own doubts and curiosities because even when theyre at home sitting on their beds Big Brother is watching them Of course one of the ironies of Nineteen EightyFour is that the surveillance state becomes an end in itself with citizens like protagonist Winston Smith in its service A wayward facial expression can give a person away as an enemy of the State keeping a diary is tantamount to selfincrimination sexuality is only for procreation not expressionMany have fretted not unreasonably that the trend around the world nowadays is towards totalitarianism The world has stopped getting richer and times are uncertain riding this wave of insecurity a bunch of demagogues have attained power Were doers not thinkers is a common refrain as if that were a badge of honour One society where this attitude is fashionable is India Where good times have been promised where intellectuals are derided where sexuality is either procreational or deviant and where even a memoir can be antinationalFor three years it looked as if Modi Shah Bhagwat et al were getting their way unimpeded If anything the political oppositions reaction more often than not was something to the effect of Im no less Hindu or patriotic than them It looked as if Modi and team would have an easy walkover in 2019 and ensure a continuation of their project of fixing India even if their idea of India suffers from ObsessiveCompulsive Disorder It looked as if we would be resigned to becoming walking slabs of meat labelled with a 12digit number injected with the preservative known as the opiate of the masses It looked as if India would have to give up its tight embrace of German philosopher GW Leibnizs phrase unitas in varetite or unity in diversityUntil the Supreme Court stepped in Its judgment is a wall in the elaborate roadmap laid out by Modi Shah Bhagwat et al Even their favoured argument that privacy was an elitist concern and that the poor needed economic security before privacy this is a variant of their periodic anticorruption plank was tossed aside by the Court Modi and team quietly licked their wounds this weekend They were also distracted by the rape conviction of another of their godmen Modis handpicked Haryana chief minister once again displayed incompetence in discharging the states basic duty maintaining law and order mdash and there were no Muslims or intellectuals to blame for it However it is not Modis style to admit error or coursecorrect and true enough word came that his buddy the CM was staying putRecently I have been watching two American TV serials The Handmaids Tale and Westworld In the first America is taken over by a religious theonomy where women are used as procreation slaves Its not an exaggeration to say that our Hindutva brigade would consider this utopian rather than dystopian Ive seen guys on Twitter assert that marital rape is their right not a crime The Court will decide this week The second an adaptation of a 1973 film is set in a resort populated by robots to grant the visitor an American frontier experience The robots would like autonomy but their thoughts and movements are monitored and controlled centrally Like Aadhaar Modi and team would see this again as utopian In their effort to fix India they prefer that we become robots or perhaps middleclass robots and underclass sheep Call me optimistic but the Court judgment will outlive Modi Yogi Adityanath and the likeminded It will go a long way in preventing an Indian dystopiaAditya Sinhas crime novel The CEO Who Lost His Head is available now He tweets autumnshade Send your feedback 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