Nothing is free.

Everything has a price. 

For the last decade, people of a certain persuasion believed, that their unquestioning faith and loyalty to their Beloved Leader, only came with benefits and dividends. There was no cost involved. They could wave their fingers, or fists, if they felt so inclined, at anyone who dared disagree, and they would come to no harm. Indeed, the more vehement, and violent, they were in professing their worship of their God Incarnate, the quicker they would ascend to power in the new Reich. 

Periodically, Beloved Leader would demand a more overt demonstration of unquestioning devotion. If he shuttered large parts of the economy with a bizarre demonetization, they would come out in droves to defend him for his audacious decision, never mind their firsthand experiences of small businesses shuttering. If he swung on a jhoola with the northern adversary, or lavished hospitality on selfsame dictator, he was applauded for his personal diplomacy. Even when terrorists attacked a convoy deep inside our borders, somehow he became the knight in shining armour and the valiant who had to get another turn in office. Crooks fled to foreign lands and his predecessors were blamed. The economy was on a trajectory to devastation and the fandom called it a much delayed spring cleaning of the cobwebs. After all, EVERYTHING was BLji's masterstroke. 

The quagmire had begun to swallow whatever was left of incomes, employment and growth before 2019 ended. Then 2020 happened. 

We are where we have never been before. The pandemic was ignored as fear mongering by pappu, and no response was put in place. Until, true to form, inaction made way for surrealism. We banged taali-thaali, lit diya and batti and showered flowers on diverse places, because this Mahabharata would be won in 21 days. And yet, the Devout stayed unwavering in their devotion. As violent as ever in their defence of His Infallibility. 

He, however, was not satisfied. He needed more evidence of complete suspension of disbelief and absolute prostration, so he decided to ratchet up the Reality Distortion Field. 

He began tossing birdseed at his faith army even as the world tumbled into helplessness and despair. And they clapped and cheered. Knowing something which they could never tell anyone. That they'd been had. And now there was no turning back from the Abyss.

Everything has a price.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan...

This story dates back to 1992. I lived in Hyderabad in those days, and would use the weekends to discover the twin cities and their hinterland. Back then, the Golconda Fort was a bit of trek, but I had heard paeans sung to its grandeur so it was a matter of time before I landed up there. As I climbed up to the main citadel through a succession of concentric battlements, I stopped abruptly when I saw a young lady diligently carving her name or initials into the ancient wall. And snapped. "Utro neeche, ye kya ho raha hai?" Without pausing for breath, she responds, "Tere baap ka hai kya?" "Hai, ab utar nahi to kuchh ulta seedha ho jaega". By now, my voice must have gone up a few decibels, attracting the attention of others nearby. The girl slinked off.

Vandalism is vandalism, whether it is Taliban fundamentalists pointing their artillery howitzers at the magnificent, serene Bamiyan Buddha or a stupid girl carving her name into ancient ramparts. Vandals are sterile, mindless trolls, who believe that violating and destroying what someone else built with love and toil, will immortalise them, and erase the memory of the original builder.

An act of monstrous vandalism is unfolding, at this very moment, in the national capital. A glorious, 3 km long, arrow straight boulevard, formally designated the Central Vista, which connects that great Victorian pile, the Rashtrapati Bhavan to the National Stadium, running right through the India Gate and the Amar Jawan Jyoti, India's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and around which, Sir Edwin Lutyens laid out the imperial capital of British India, is in the cross-hairs of this grotesque, hideous attack.

Our overlords, for they no longer see themselves as merely temporary, democratically elected, incumbents who would, in time, have to relinquish charge and pass the baton, but fancy themselves as founders of a thousand year reich, have decided to take a giant wrecking ball to the Central Vista.

A huge swathe of land on either side of the Rajpath, which is the modest amount of macadamised road a mere two lanes in width, running the length of the Central Vista, has, for a century, been a public commons. For generations of Dilliwalas, it has been a place for paddle boating in the long, reflecting pools, morning walks and late night ice-cream sorties to the green tubelit Sardarji Di Gaddis. The Central Vista was designed to emphatically denote the power and grandeur of the Raj. It segued, effortlessly, into the living heart of the Republic of India. If its great sandstone buildings denote solidity and endurance, its endless acres of turf, gnarled old trees, pools and fountains create a haven of peace and calm where brows uncrease and stress falls away.

A bureaucratic decision, rushed through when the country's attention is on combating the COVID-19 pandemic, and one which would be of a piece with despots of the Chinese, North Korean or Russian regimes, has changed land use of this entire, beautiful commons and appropriated it for building a brand new Xanadu for our brand new Kubla Khans.

Unsurprisingly, all pretense of democratic, consultative process, has been dispensed with, in arriving at this decision, purportedly in the interest of speed and decisiveness. It doesn't stop there. As the government of the day completely abdicates its responsibility for protecting hundreds of million migrant labourers, petty traders, small business owners, blue-collar workers, and their dependents from imminent economic devastation, and offers nothing except hollow homilies to help them to survive and build back their lives, these new age Neros and Marie Antoinettes have set aside Rs. TWENTY THOUSAND CRORES, for funding their Forbidden City. That's money from the Consolidated Fund of India. Money that you, I and every other Indian voluntarily handed over to the government, in the form of direct and indirect taxes. Money which was meant to be held in trust and spent for pursuing the greatest good of the greatest number.

Catastrophes are the despot's best friend. They provide cover fire for unspeakably grotesque, unapologetically egregious, self-aggrandisement.

One day, in decades to come, we shall look back and wonder how we remained mute spectators as the new empire vivisected and dismembered one of the grandest, most beautiful cityscapes not merely in our country, but in the entire world.

Right now, though, cry a quiet tear, for yourself, and for the generations who will follow you. Our Bamiyan Buddha moment is at hand.

Salary. Payable when able?

By now you have probably heard of multiple instances of people's salaries being partially docked, or postponed in full or part, as an immediate consequence of the COVID-19 lockdown.

Step back and think about what messages are implicit in this situation.

• Top Managements of organisations, under implicit, or possibly explicit, instructions from their investors, are moving to mitigate impairment of the financial health of the enterprise.
• One group of creditors, who are currently in no position to insist on their credit being honoured, is employees. The economy was already in deep trouble even before the pandemic hit; when all revenue gets turned off as abruptly as it has, for over a month, and counting, the outcomes worsen by orders of magnitude. They will, in the event, take any punishment which comes their way.
• Managements have, therefore, chosen to attack this statutory obligation with a sledgehammer. Redundancies are rising rapidly, and even those employees who survive the culling, are worse off than they were, just last month.
• Needless to say, while employees' incomes are shrinking, or vanishing, their multiple obligations won't. A home mortgage will, at best, permit a temporary moratorium of maintaining monthly installments, but at a punitive cost in terms of increased interest in the near future. Education, healthcare, energy, household provisions, transfers to support the extended family and so on will not pause, merely because the salary does.

It shocks me, that this assault on employees' compensation has drawn as little anger, revulsion and condemnation as it has.

The contemptuous indifference to the economic, and indeed physical and mental, well-being of employees, at a time when it is more fragile than it has been in my memory, (which goes back to the 1970s, I should add), is freighted with many messages, some of which I shall try to unpack and decode.

• The only voice, which counts at the corporate decision making table, is the investor's voice. His/her ROI must be protected, no matter what else is thrown under the bus to ensure it. This is not surprising. Anyone familiar with the role of incentives in decision making will know that the financial interest of most top management teams is bound, inextricably, with shareholder returns. All the other stuff about caring capitalism is just, well, stuff.
• The entire idea, that equity investment in a business is in the nature of risk capital, which will burgeon when the business enjoys fair climes and favourable winds, and wither when it faces adversities, is a fiction, an oft-repeated fiction which sounds credible exactly because it is repeated so often. Investors, particularly, all sorts of institutional investors, refuse to even contemplate capital attrition, much less allow it, fully cognizant of what it may imply for other participants in the organisational value-chain. Did you notice my refusal to use the popular word, 'stakeholders', and resorting, instead, to an elliptical phrase? 'Stakeholders' has a heartwarmingly broad sweep. The moment the proverbial hits the fan, the only stake which must be, is, privileged is Big Capital.
• The State will offer plenty of lip sympathy to struggling employees, and even appear to raise a disapproving eyebrow or two at errant employers who beleaguer employees. This will be accompanied by little or no legislative or executive action, either to proscribe such actions, or to mitigate the suffering of employees at the receiving end. Managements and investors understand this well, given that here too, a system of incentives, called electoral bonds, or other such virtuous-sounding names, is at work behind the veil.
• Investors in equity become entitled, in perpetuity, to returns on their investment, either in the form of capital appreciation or distributed profits (dividends). Employees must justify their presence on the payroll every day that they spend on it. Employees sign up to a salary which grows in accordance with the company's reward system. Now, it turns out, that there was a force majeur clause, presumably inscribed in invisible ink, which qualified their salary itself. In effect, employers can work, with impunity, on the assumption that salary is not even payable when able but payable IF able.

Thomas Piketty and several other economists and thinkers have been warning us about the ever widening chasm between an ever-shrinking global elite and all the rest of us grunts. COVID-19 has underscored, for hundreds of million employees around the world, how tenuous their lease on their salary really is.

We are just over a week away from International Workers' Day, marked on May 1 every year. Most readers are likely unaware of the history which led to this observance. It commemorates a massive strike in Chicago on this day, back in 1886, which led to the US-wide adoption, over the following decades, of the 8-hour workday. The issues, 134 years ago, pertained to just conditions of employment for the working man. In 2020, the employment contract itself seems to have turned into a flimsy, fragile parchment which might, at any moment, turn to dust.

A few hundred million livelihoods may be devastated over the very near future, but hedge fund partners will not be surrendering multimillion-buck bonuses any time soon.

Preaching to the converted

An interesting issue came up in a conversation with a dear friend . "You always take a polarised position on politics which does not help you bring new people around to your way of thinking. The world has a lot of undecided people, who are looking for a persuasive argument, which will help them pick one side over another, but your polemics turn them away". And further. . "If you are truly objective and rational, you will be able to see that the people you oppose also do some good. If you acknowledge it before getting into your critical commentary, you will sound more credible to those who straddle the fence, and perhaps, even bring some of them around to your positions". Culminating in this. "There will be more elections in future and the undecided will really be the deciding vote. If you can bring around even a few people to your point-of-view, it might help make the difference between victor and vanquished".

Where do political positions come from? From what I have seen so far, there is a considerable amount of politics which gets passed down in families. A lot of it has to do with community or religious affiliations. This legacy is already in place before a child gets into her teens. Those kids who were heckling the nanis and dadis of Shaheen Bagh with 'goli maro' slogans, or rioting at Chand Bagh, accompanied their fathers and uncles to the protest site. They have been blooded in a particular ideology and it is unlikely that they will change their minds any time soon. My father, who never explicitly aligned himself with a particular party, leaned to the Left, and if I identify as a democratic socialist, it is because of our countless conversations about political power, how it is distributed, what it does to the lives of people, and whether it is possible to reset its inequitable distribution.

Political positions are guided by self-interest. This may be related to religion, economic status, social class, specific or generic anxieties about people or things, assessment of the balance between primacy of the individual/collective and so on. Even the most altruistic or 'virtue-signalling' positions are likely underpinned in self-interest (though this warrants a separate post). What are my positions?

• I abhor and accept no compromises with: gender-disparity and misogyny, racism, casteism, religious phobias (Antisemitism, Islamophobia), sectarianism, communalism, stratospheric disparities of income and wealth and government policies which encourage them, totalitarianism, majoritarianism, extra-judicial vigilantism. And so on.
• I endorse and promote: freedom of thought and expression (including religious thought and expression), equality of status and opportunity, fraternity of all peoples across the world, economic justice and system of progressive personal taxes, a durable and comprehensive social safety net, independent judiciary, competent and autonomous institutions, scientific temperament and intellectual curiosity, free and fearless news media, affirmative action for the physically, socially or economically disadvantaged. And so on.

My writing about these issues is, therefore, an act of political activism. What does political activism seek to achieve?

1. Political activism is intended to organise individuals into collectives. The Mahatma, Madiba, Dr. King and Velupillai Prabhakaran sensed that there was far wider support for the causes they espoused than was visible, particularly to their particular adversary. Their actions were designed to galvanise people to action and each action snowballed their movement. Their message to their people was of resistance to a malign overlord. Their strategy was to show them that they were not alone in their frustration and pain; that while an individual could be muzzled or snuffed out, the collective was impossible to mute. They worked as the glue which fused individuals into great movements.
2. Political activism clarifies hazy, unarticulated frustrations into cogent ideas of dissent and resistance. Stated differently, political activism gives vocabulary and grammar to what was incipient and repressed. Greta Thunberg can't possibly be the first person of her generation to agonise over the ravaging of the biosphere by insatiable human greed, but she became the catalyst for a global movement by speaking her mind.
3. Political activism creates a litmus test, parsing those for and against a viewpoint. When Mr. Modi called for his allies to prefix their SocMed identities with "chowkidar", he set up a binary; there was no middle ground. In addition, he gave them an honorific which they shared with the greatest in the land. Gandhi's Khadi, Lenin's red scarves and Trump's MAGA hats are all shibboleths. These days, a cursory look at the comments below any SocMed post, particularly one with a political colour, divide neatly into pro and anti. 

What, then, about the 'undecided people' who triggered this post?

Go back and read what I abhor and what I endorse. People who claim to be undecided about: misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, freedom of speech and expression, scientific temperament or independent media; are really people who represent views at complete odds with mine. People, in essence, who are waiting for the moment when their views will sound less horrible because the Overton Window has moved that way. They are fellow-travelers of everything which I oppose. And it's a waste of my energy and time to try to bring them around.

India, and the world at large, has ceded huge ground to sectarian demagogues with totalitarian ambitions. Remarkably, their positions enjoy widespread support and even a scintilla of dissent is squelched by the armies of vicious trolls at their beck and call.

In such a time, the task for a small voice like mine is to give  some vocabulary to those struggling to find it, to contribute to the glue which will coalesce them into a meaningful opposition, to shake out hypocrisy and sanctimony. The grand consensus doesn't need my approbation to validate itself. Those who feel cold, lonely and lost because they are apparently railing against what everyone else worships, though? They need to hear encouragement; to gather around, make common cause, fight on, no matter how daunting the odds.

My time and effort is best spent preaching to the converted.

p.s. A young reader who read the first draft drew my attention to this essay which highlights very similar themes in the context of white people's views of racism.

Good times? They are here now.

1. Our GDP is ~$3 trillion or ~$250 billion per month or ~$10 billion per day (25 day working month).

2. It looks likely that COVID-19 is going to be with us at least for another month. 

3. Given the restrictions already in place, and further strictures which are bound to follow, we should expect at least a 5% impairment of the GDP run rate until April end. In other words, if the expected GDP for the 6 weeks from now to April end was $375 billion on a steady state basis, it will now come in at $356 billion. Assuming that India bounces back instantly and the remaining 11 months of Fiscal 20-21 deliver $250 billion per month, India will wrap up 20-21 with a GDP of $2.99 trillion.

4. Now the Rupee slipped from 69 to the USD in April 19 to 73 to the USD right now, a 5.6% depreciation. Let's assume that it erodes only 5% during Fiscal 20-21. That will leave the Rupee at about 77 to the USD a year hence. 

5. Adjusted for this depreciated Rupee, the GDP slips to $2.84 trillion for 20-21, a hard fall of 16% in USD terms. 

6. Assuming that our Fiscal 24-25 goalpost remains unchanged at $5 trillion, India's GDP will have to grow at >15.2% in constant, or >20% at current terms for these 4 years.

7. The official growth rate right now is ~4%. It needs to quadruple to give the economy a fighting chance of making the goal. 

8. Put differently, India needs to grow her GDP as much in 3 months as it is currently doing in the year. 

9. Capital formation, particularly by the private sector, is at a standstill. Banks had little risk appetite; what little remained, has vanished post Yes Bank. The equity market is unlikely to shake off the Coronavirus before Wall Street. Don't hold your breath for animal spirits there. 

10. What is the government (and apparently, most of my putative friends on Facebook) most interested in right now? Pushing NPR/NRC/CAA through, by fair means or their means. 

An administration which has brought India such shining economic success, is building on it to deliver shining social success.

Buckle up and soak in the lovely view. 

These are the "good times", which you are going to remember, wistfully, in 2025.

Desecration of Dr. Babasaheb's political legacy

I am wracked by shame today. 

Ramdas Athavale, a minister in the Central Cabinet, leader of the eponymous splinter group of the Republican Party of India, added volumes of vomit to the overflowing bowl of embarrassment that is the zeitgeist. If you have not seen the "Go Carona" (sic) video, search it now. I will not dignify it by appending it to this post. 

Why am I ashamed? Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar evolved an independent political space for Dalits in stages: first by launching the Independent Labour Party of India, then, the Scheduled Caste Forum and finally, the Republican Party of India, which he announced in September 1956 but died before it was formally constituted. 

Why did he choose to name it "Republican Party"? I am speculating here but my hypothesis is this. For Dr. Babasaheb, the Reublic, where the Citizen was the Sovereign, where there was no greater power in the country than every last one of us, must have represented an even greater sociopolitical value than Democracy. By the nomenclature he chose, he was sending a loud and clear message: that the long oppressed Dalits were, henceforth, not merely masters of their own destinies, they were equal partners in being the sovereign rulers of India. His message to Dalits, "Educate, Agitate, Organize", critically emphasized "Organize". The organising principle was people's sovereignty and the Republican Party of India would evolve into the point of the spear. 

That incomparable legacy; of Education, Agitation, Organisation; was publicly destroyed today. By a politician who claims to inherit the great Babasaheb's mantle.

Then again, that is the price of the Faustian bargain that he made with the party which stands for "Uneducate, Oppress, Destroy".

Get-out-of-jail-free card for all the toxic isms

Racism, sexism, religious sectarianism, casteism and all assorted other isms if their ilk share a few characteristics.

Before I go there, a little rewind to the moment which triggered today's contemplation.

A bunch of us friends were witness, to a 70-something male, launch into a particularly obnoxious riff about what attracts women at different stages of their lives. This bloke, I understood from my friends, was a corporate mover/shaker in his halcyon days. He continues to serve on various company boards but otherwise lives a retired life in various resort-style homes. His authority may have been sharply diminished but the sense of entitlement and arrogance is as unpleasantly evident as his bulbous nose.

Our conversation soon moved to the wider canvas of everyday misogyny and normalisation of sexism at the Indian workplace, which stubbornly resists attempts to tame it, notwithstanding the law or public abhorrence, expressed, for instance, during the #MeToo moments of 2018. And that was when a recurrent theme popped up.

Apparently, men who have cabins or large, enclosed, offices, now rarely close their room doors when they are meeting a woman- colleague or business associate, individually. This is to prevent subsequent accusations of inappropriate behaviour behind closed doors and all the potential consequences which might follow. I objected, perhaps not too vigorously, to this train of thought but it never left my mind. A day later, I have marshalled my thoughts and, even as it reawakens the disquiet I felt yesterday about backing off too soon, it is important that I explain why I think so.

1. Women may have been a part of the workforce from time immemorial, but through those millennia, male domination of the workplace has gone on, unchecked. Even today, the gender pay gap in North America stands at 82%. Women work harder, and almost always continue to carry the bulk of the homemaking burden, to get the same place in the corporate, or even bureaucratic, hierarchy. And eventually, the glass ceiling comes calling.

2. Women will, almost without exception, experience sexual harassment at the workplace. It may be overt: demanding favours in lieu of advancement or advantage, or covert: lewd messaging, sexually explicit personal comments, or worse: non-consensual contact all the way up to its worst manifestations. If I was to hazard a guess, the reported, and hopefully, remedied, incidence is no more than a single digit percentage of what actually happens. This is after, and in spite of, laws on sexual harassment at work becoming almost a universal feature of statute books around the world.

3. Victim shaming is the first instinctive reaction, every time an incidence of a minor misdemeanour or a major infraction is reported or otherwise becomes public knowledge. You have already heard or read about all the shapes and forms which Gaslighting takes, so I don't intend to elaborate.

Which brings me to my disappointment with myself.

The very suggestion: that a woman may falsely accuse a male colleague or business associate of impropriety at the workplace, because she sees advantage in so doing, is horribly troubling.

1. Males routinely get away with their worst excesses under the catchall "boys will be boys". What makes it worse is this isn't even necessarily a blemish on a male resumé: he's just assumed to be a particularly virile, or perhaps raffish, chap. Sometimes this extends further. "Oh, if he hit on her, she must be special; he has discriminating tastes on the distaff side, you know".

2. A woman pays a very heavy price for calling out her tormentor. All efforts are made to silence her: bully, threat, bribe, legal gags. We are hearing a lot these days about the nondisclosure agreements which Bloomberg bound several of his victims under. Even if she does get her story out, her subsequent reputation is always marred by innuendo. "Takes two to tango". "Sleeping her way up the corporate ladder". These, and much viler comments adhere to her like indelible stains. If you are unfamiliar with it, this is a good time to google "Roger Ailes".

3. Subordinates seek closed-door meetings with their supervisors, or hierarchical superiors, only because they wish to discuss something which warrants confidentiality. A superior who will discriminate between his male and female subordinates in the manner of taking such a meeting, is grossly iniquitous. It reveals HIS incapacity to conduct such a conversation without risking language or action which will likely attract censure. In the meantime, the open door will effectively muzzle the woman's ability to fully discuss what she wanted to, in the first place, and grant the corporate seal of approval to hypocrisy and injustice.

What does all of this have to do with the other isms I brought up at the top? Everything.

Replace gender by race, religion, caste or sexual orientation; all the issues do not change a whit.

Victim shaming is our permanent get-out-of-jail-free card.

Blood on whose hands?

Someone said this to me yesterday. "If you voted for 56 in 2014, you could be forgiven for being gullible and succumbing to promises of "sab ka saath, sab ka vikas", or to express your frustration with a comatose government. or even the anti-incumbency, "These guys have been around 10 years; why don't we give the other guys a chance and see what they can do?". But if you voted for 56 in 2019, you did so with the full knowledge of what went down in his first five years, and the attack on JNU, the barbarity of Jamia and the carnage in Northeast Delhi is on you".

I'm now beginning to realise, that those who did, are actually quite pleased with all these manifestations of brute majoritarianism. I now see clearly that demagoguery has succeeded in amplifying existing inferiority complexes and weaponising them against the 'Other'. That this project rests on half-truths, fictions, fables and myths is utterly irrelevant. Demagoguery has successfully painted scepticism, rigour of inquiry and openness into effete obsessions of (another bad word) intellectuals.

They are seeing and reading the same news stories as you and I are. Several of them are all in so deep, that their Muslim hate, (I choose to eschew the term 'Islamophobia' as an unnecessary euphemism; let's call it what it is), is now worn as a badge of pride on their chest. The rest continue to practice false equivalence. "Offfoh, it isn't anti-Muslim, both parties are equally culpable".
People who have never read the CAA will keep telling you, "it isn't meant to take anyone's citizenship away, it is meant to GIVE citizenship to *persecuted minorities* from Muslim-majority neigbouring countries". Here is the act. http://egazette.nic.in/WriteReadData/2019/214646.pdf
No, there is no reference to either persecuted or minorities in the act. All it does it creates a religious test for granting citizenship, and this does not have precedent. However, it will BECOME precedent for "Reasonable Classification" in times to come.

India's Muslims are reading the writing on the wall; their right of citizenship is facing its greatest in independent India. You can parrot the propaganda, because it suits your prejudice; be more honest and accept that you really do want to see disparate citizenship rights; or see it for what it is. Not a traffic inconvenience in Southeast Delhi, or Mumbai Central. Not an ISI conspiracy to spread unrest. Not a paid assignment for pay-per-use intellectuals. But a brazen, frontal attack on our Constitutional paradigm.

Please read the promise that our wise Constitution makers made to our generations to eternity. That the Republic secured, for all its citizens:
JUSTICE, social, economic and political;
LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship;
EQUALITY of status and of opportunity;
and to promote among them all
FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation

If you got all the way here, you are probably furious, one way or another. Either with me for being a gormless liberal. Or with the state of the nation.

Pick your fury.

Martyrs' Day 2020

Today is Martyr's Day. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated exactly 72 years ago, today. This post is dedicated to all those millions, known and unknown, who built India.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
From "Friends of Voltaire"- Evelyn Beatrice Hall

A common refrain I hear these days is "Liberals are really illiberal. They won't get into a discussion with people with whom they disagree. Is this liberal?"

Now, I can't speak for everyone who identifies as a liberal, but here is where I stand on this allegation.

1. You have the right to believe in, and say, whatever you want. If you believe that India belongs, primarily, to people of a certain religion; adherents of all other religions, and atheists, are required to know their (subordinate) status, feel free to say it. If you believe that women are the inferior gender and the world really belongs to men, say it. If you believe that the 'Aryan' race is the superior to all others, say that. If you believe that people born to poverty are only paying for the sins of their previous lives, and deserve the privations, indignities, squalor and disease which comes with it, say that too.
   
   DO NOT, HOWEVER, EXPECT THAT I WILL BE PREPARED TO ENGAGE YOU IN A REASONED CONVERSATION ABOUT ANY OF THESE, OR SIMILAR, PROPOSITIONS. YOU ARE A DISGRACE TO THE WORLD, AND I HAVE NOTHING TO DISCUSS WITH YOU.
   If, in contrast to such brain-dead bigotry, you ask questions about any of these issues, are uncertain or unclear, I am always willing to talk to you at length.
    
2. When I was rather young, my politics was described, variously, as Marxist, Communist or Leftist. With time, I moved away from the notion of violent overthrow of the established order, and was appalled by the tyrannies which the real-world manifestations of Marxist societies had produced. My positions began to shift away from every form of totalitarianism, whether it emerged from the Left or the Right. Individual rights, particularly those of equality before the law and an independent judiciary, free thought and expression, fair representation in legislative/executive arms of government, practice of religion, ownership of property (subject to reasonable restriction), conduct of business or profession (with caveats) became the keystones of my view of the world.
   
3.  The great George Orwell showed the way, to me and goodness knows how many others. I identified, by my late 20s as a Social Democrat, with a tilt toward a more statist political economy, particularly in sectors like infrastructure, education, healthcare and social security. This position has broadly defined my sociopolitical identity ever since.
   
4. The world, goaded on by the victory of free-market capitalism over communism with the collapse of the USSR in December 1991, moved decisively towards unfettered primacy of corporate, and increasingly, global capital flows.
   India had begun her own march towards economic liberalisation, earlier that fateful year, in the face of looming fiscal collapse. My cohort, of people who came into the work force starting the early 1980s, were the biggest beneficiaries of the tailwinds created by India's liberalisation, which propelled us to almost unimaginable prosperity, as compared to our parents' generation, even as it also lifted millions out of poverty at the bottom of the economic pyramid. I will readily admit that the next two decades were hardly about politics. Accumulation (of all sorts) and the responsibilities of building the household defined my life. Politics, at best, was only instrumental, sometimes as a catalyst, at others as a dampener.
    
5. I am older now, and the self-centeredness which defined my last thirty years, has made way for restoring at least some part of the idealism which informed the awakening of my political consciousness in my teens and early twenties. In the meantime, the go-go 90s and noughties turn out to have been drivers of unprecedented polarisation along every axis. More wealth now lies in fewer hands than ever in recorded history. Politics has ceded all middle ground and shifted, sans challenge, further and further right. Wealth, particularly in its most egregious form, and political power concentrated with a handful, have colluded and coalesced into a creature which now brandishes the State itself as its proprietary instrument. Demagoguery, fear-mongering, bullying and the often-brutal silencing of dissent have become commonplace, from the Philippines to Brazil and all points in between. We know it too, right?

Still with me?

I cannot be silent any more.

I cannot be indifferent any more.

I am NOT A LIBERAL ANY MORE.

Let me step away and end with lines written by the great poet, Ramdhari Singh "Dinkar".

तिमिर पुत्र ये दस्यु कहीं कोई दुष्काण्ड रचें ना
सावधान हो खडी देश भर में गांधी की सेना
बलि देकर भी बलि! स्नेह का यह मृदु व्रत साधो रे
मंदिर औ’ मस्जिद दोनों पर एक तार बांधो रे

समर शेष है, नहीं पाप का भागी केवल व्याध
जो तटस्थ हैं, समय लिखेगा उनके भी अपराध.