However the way the matter was discussed, argued, arbitrated over the media along with in the social networking sites; it indicates something more than the media fetishism of the emerging intellectual section of India. The way Sen was pounced upon and vilified by the band of Modi followers who made their presence felt upon the grand stage quite clear, is something ominous in itself. Even if we are to condone the fatuous remark by Chandan Mitra about stripping Sen from his Bharat Ratna after coming to power (as if the bestowal of such an award in a democratic country depends entirely upon the ruling political regime), we must take account that Mitra’s remark was just one minor tip of an enormous iceberg of hatred, intolerance, bigotry that hides the seed of tyranny within itself.

Most of us have a precarious idea of tyranny: as if it would emerge one day out of the blue on the city streets in the form of a march of band in a martial uniform pledging their allegiance to a cult and a leader. This is not the inception, but the upshot of an autocratic system. Rather any dictatorial process begins insidiously, almost imperceptibly, and spreads like a plague vicious and savage, but the signs that are almost universally indispensable to this development become obvious from the very beginning: an emergence of an infallible leader, a chosen one who cannot be mocked-ridiculed-vituperated; a miracle story of unprecedented progress and development brought about by the chosen one: namely the story of development of Gujarat in recent years under Modi; the witch hunt and heresy seeking that already begins when someone as a globally eminent economist humbly puts that he finds that Gujarat model is not wholesome and Modi lacked political convictions to made the minorities feel safe in his province. Maybe Sen was absolutely and blatantly false, maybe Modi’s role in 2002 riot in his state was impeccable, maybe the economic model that he prescribes is the way to progress: but that does not renders Modi or his followers the power to stifle a moderate voice of dissent. When a very harmless caricature of Modi’s plan for future India was brought up on the narendramodiplans.com website that only insinuated that Modi’s plans were evasive and not concrete, it had to be shut down because of the moral policing on the part of the Modi followers who seemed to be hell-bent to asphyxiate any voice of dissent.

It is not the point of this article to submit how pluralist or democratic the current political regime is. Certainly the people of Manipur or Kashmir, let alone the ones being ‘Green-hunted’, bear the mark of the irony of the word democracy on their body and mind every single day. As Sen stridently stated himself, his motto was not to promote UPA in any way, rather he stated his reservation against a single individual. The first premise of democracy is to understand that things are not essentially dichotomous, that a simple division between Modi-Rahul Gandhi cannot but harm the federal system of India, that an incongruous and horrible body count between 1984 Delhi and 2002 Gujarat is not the way to a sturdier democratic progression. The first thing an autocratic regime does is to undermine the multiplicity and paint the world in two sides: one horrific and desecrated and other sacrosanct. This is essentially the game Modi and his followers are playing all over the field of Indian politics and we are dangerously close to fall victim of that game.

Beneath the blemished and peeling exterior of our democracy there remains a gracefulness and ingenuity of an unalterable unadulterated truth: the truth of acceptance, the truth of multiplicity that emanated from the secular tradition of India. May be it can be traced back to the religious orders where most of the faiths of our nation never had any idea of heresy and canonical laws on the first place or grew out of that, may be it can be attributed to the rules of different political regimes over the eons that ruled this land and though they harboured different beliefs in themselves, they had to reconcile with the fact of their subjects’ having different faiths or different version of the same faith. An absence of monolithic form of history is perhaps the most salient feature of the history of the subcontinent and that is what brings us to today’s truth about our democratic process. The 1946 Kolkata, the persecution of Kashmiri pundits, the 1984 Delhi, the demolition of Babri mosque, the 2002 Gujarat: the blotches are countless and yet we persevered. We persevered through the emergency when it became evident that no single family or regime, no matter how pluralist and tolerant as it may appear on its surface, is beyond having the seed of totalitarianism within itself. In a democracy such as this, heckled, maimed and somewhat staggering in its everyday advance, it is indispensable to identify the early signs of an emerging dictatorial regime and keep ourselves reminding that solutions offered may have a higher price than it demands. (IPA Service)