As increasingly terrifying incidents of lynching are taking place all over the country, they’ve left me in a constant state of alert. Not only do I constantly look over my shoulder because I always have the feeling that I’m being followed, I look at every stranger I meet with suspicion. Every day, I wake up shouting from a nightmare of a mob knocking down my door.

No, I’m not afraid of the mob trying to kill me. Anyone trying to enter my farmhouse without my permission is going to have to first introduce themselves to the ample fists of my head of security. What the insidious group of people in my nightmares do to me is a fate worse than death. They surround me in the middle of the night and force me to do the one thing that is anathema to my existence: taking a stand.

Which was quite unnecessary. I was going to speak out anyway. Now that things are almost on the doorstep of the city I live in, I feel that this is the right time for me to say something meandering and meaningless. I’m going to downplay the effects of lynching and exaggerate the faults of liberals standing against it so that I can continue to be India’s Greatest Centrist Pundit. I do this to be palatable to a Right-wing audience even though half of them have no idea that I exist and the other half are busy writing “presstitute” in the comment section of this article without even reading it first.

No one killed Junaid Khan

Now, even I have to agree that things have gotten out of hand. Reading how those people in the train ended Junaid Khan’s young life was horrifying. And the apathy of the people who were busy taking videos on their mobile phones instead of saving the victim and his brothers is something that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

What I want to ask is, how did we get here? According to the Centrist Pundits Guide to Magical Thinking, giving abject bigots absolute power turns them into peaceful doves who begin to care about everyone they rule over regardless of religion, caste, or sexuality. According to our hypothesis, we should be living in the most peaceful time this country has ever seen.

Yet, here we are! Now, I’m sure my presumption can’t be wrong. After all, would I have a standing invitation to every party at Shekhar Gupta’s house if I was wrong about anything, ever? I don’t think so! Therefore, there must be another reason why such incidents keep happening.

I know some people out there like to blame the governing party and the Prime Minister for everything. But as we’ve established many times before, it’s not them who keep prodding at the sectarian conflicts that have plagued this country since eternity. It’s the fringe that does that!

Fringe elements like the Minister of State for Culture Mahesh Sharma. He’s a member of the council of central ministers! That has got nothing to do with the Prime Minister! Modi has no control over him. It’s not like he keeps his ministers on a tight leash and doesn’t allow them to say anything publicly or pass a file without clearing it with him first. How much sway does the Prime Minister have over a person who directly reports to him? Mahesh Sharma is a rogue actor who is speaking on his own behalf. That’s why the party punishes him by giving him more and more responsibility.

Other rogue actors include people who don’t hold any post of consequence. Like the Governor of Tripura, Tathagata Roy, whose twitter feed is a smorgasbord of fake news and casual calls for genocide. But who even cares about what he says? C’mon. Be truthful. Half of you think Tripura is a made-up state isn’t it? So why blame the Governor of a state that cannot even be reached by NH-1? No one is really listening to him, except for maybe people who are just looking for a reason to go on a killing spree. But then those people will use any excuse, won’t they? It isn’t like the Prime Minister can simply ask the governor to stop with the hate speech, right? The Prime Minister is all for free speech, as long as the speech calls for the culling of a small percentage of a state’s population.

One person who has a clean chit in all of this is the Prime Minister himself. No one can even lift a finger and accuse him of anything, except apathy. He never even mentions the minority community in a negative context. For example, in 2015, while campaigning for the Bihar elections, Modi said, “Nitish Kumar is going to take your reservation and hand it over to another minority community.” We have no idea who the unnamed minority community is. It’s just so unclear. Was it Verdukians? Rastafarians? Scientologists? I guess we will never know! It’s not fair to anyone for us to speculate.

Then, earlier this year, while campaigning for the UP elections, Modi talked about how there should be equality between the religions in UP. When there is electricity on Eid, why isn’t it there on Diwali? After all, the entire liberal brigade began accusing him of spreading communal hatred. How is that possible? He’s just inferring that one community gets favoured more than another community without any evidence. That’s not discrimination! He’s just being prudent. Even if there is light on all festivals, he’s just reiterating it.

Just because he says something that has no base, in reality, doesn’t mean he has nefarious intentions! How dare you think that? Look, if you take what he said and strip it of all meaning, context, pattern and implications, then it’s just a bunch of words. Why would anyone have a problem with words? Classic Liberals! Assigning meaning to things people say by putting them in the proper context! Such debbie downers.

Some people are never satisfied. Even after the Prime Minister made an appeal to the people on Gandhi’s behalf to stop killing each other in the name of the cow, you liberals criticised him for not doing enough. What more do you want from him? He took an emphatic stand without letting a single soul know what his own opinion was. It was a smooth balancing act of shutting up your critics whilst not letting your base down. It’s not like he can stop people from killing each other. If only we had some sort of policing force that we could use to put a stop to all this madness!

Will you please be quiet please?

Look, I get it. There has been a trend over the past few years where consumption of beef and bovine safety are being used as a pretext to unleash a murderous mob on primarily minority targets. We also see that those who we have invested with the responsibility to make sure this does not happen to this turn the other cheek because of their cynical calculation that it might help them politically.

You know what the real problem is, though? All you liberals constantly talking about the various incidents of lynching. Sure, lynching is bad, but liberals make it so much worse by yapping about it. Remember, speaking about injustice is the bad thing and not the injustice itself. It’s the Indian way. Don’t talk about our problems and one day everything will turn out okay.

You liberals still don’t get it, do you? You keep fighting for frivolous causes like not empowering rabid mobs to go on a murderous rampage. When will you learn that speaking the truth isn’t going to get you any where? If I was in the business of telling the truth, I’d still be posting rambling thoughts on my live journal, languishing in obscurity. Now, I’m heading to the Rajya Sabha. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

You, elitists, have no idea what the real India cares about. Not getting murdered on your way home from shopping for an upcoming festival is not what they’re concerned with. They want roads. They want jobs. They want Narendra Modi! So, go back to your ivory towers! Come back when you have real things to protest, like Momos or people returning their Sahitya Akademi awards.

Until then, I’ll see you during the next party at Shekhar Gupta’s house.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @over_rated.