BENGALURU: Professor Narayan Deo Bakshi watched the leaves of the parijat tree rustle in the morning breeze. The gentle sway of the offshoots, flushed with the rich blossom of white flowers, added to the serenity of the morning. Flowers falling intermittently on the grassy patch below had turned the ground into a white Carpet.
With a cup of tea in his hand, he settled himself comfortably in a garden chair. The aroma of green tea, brewed and served a short while ago, pervaded the air around him.
Just yesterday, a visiting professor from Germany had paid rich compliments to the beautiful lawn.
‘A house without a garden is like dinner without wine,’ Professor Bakshi had quipped. ‘The gardens in Delhi are bewitching; they’re good for your eyes but bad for your lungs,’ he had added, referring to the rising level of PM in Delhi’s air; PM, as in particulate matter. But Bakshi’s real concern was about another PM – Prime Minister Raghav Mohan.
‘This man is dangerous and proving to be quite invincible’, he had explained to the visiting professor while strolling around the patio. ‘Not just Delhi, he has made the whole country unliveable!’ Now, Bakshi sat checking his emails as he sipped his tea. Whose article should I retweet today? He scrolled down the list. ‘Rising Violence on Dalits in the Past 4 Years’ by Sumana Ghosh from Harvard Kennedy School. ‘Umm ... No, no, no Sumana! You missed it,’ he murmured.
He dialled a number on his phone. Sumana was on the line from Harvard. ‘Hi Sumana, I went through your article,’ Bakshi said when she picked up. ‘You missed the point completely. It’s not in accordance with what we’d discussed. It fails to link the issue specifically with Raghav Mohan’s policies. Okay, hammer it home in your next article. See, there’s no point in highlighting an atrocity if we can’t have Raghav Mohan implicated in it. ’ He moved on to the next. ‘Intolerance on the Rise: Right to Life Ends at your Dinner Plate in the New India’, wrote Stuti Desai, an Associate Professor at Humboldt University, Germany. The article was a scathing attack on Raghav Mohan and directly linked the violence against beef eaters to the PM’s policies. Bakshi grinned, happy that Stuti had followed his instructions well. This piece would make for the perfect retweet that morning. He retweeted the article with the remark – ‘Is fringe the new mainstream @pmraghavmohan? The nation finds your silence deafening.’
Satisfied, he put his phone aside and turned his attention to the newspaper lying on the side table. It carried a front-page story on the welfare efforts of the Raghav Mohan government for Dalits and minorities, drawing applause from international bodies. The headlines leapt to his eyes. Piqued, he folded the newspaper and put it away from his view. Such stories didn’t merit his attention. He would never tweet such ‘propaganda’.
He revelled in the fact that he commanded a growing number of followers on Twitter but grieved to realize that the majority of them were intolerant; they wouldn’t digest his posts and, instead, would post counter-facts and research, questioning his assumptions and exposing his posts to critical analysis. He was sick of these people.
Trolls!
Those opposing your viewpoints in the old days were welcomed; now they’re called trolls. With progress, dissent has lost its glory and respect. Once a proud companion of democracy, dissent is now orphaned; no one on either side of the fence likes it. The hallowed ‘critic’ of yore has become ‘intolerant’ in the modern times. That’s the law of progression, maybe!
Excerpted from The New Delhi Conspiracy by Meenakshi Lekhi with Krishna Kumar, with permission from HarperCollins Publishers India