So, the government wants us to venerate June 25 as Samvidhan Hatya Diwas or ‘Constitution Murder’ day. This is confusing because for most Indians June 25 is a glorious, golden date, because duh, it is the day Kapil’s Devils won us our very first cricket World Cup. But I guess ‘the day Indian cricket came of age on the global stage’ isn’t half as click-baity as ‘the day democracy died’, especially if the responsibility for said death can be lumped on the opposition.
Nobody doubts the PR savvy of our ruling party—they know that the efforts of YouTube educators, the opposition, and social activists have made ‘Samvidhan’ a sexy, trending word understood even in rural, illiterate India. All those nicely designed preamble T-shirts at protests, MPs taking their oaths while brandishing a paperback copy of the Constitution in their hands, and ‘Modi versus the Constitution of India’ emerging as the mic drop rejoinder to the oft-parroted question ‘But Modi versus who?’ have made them eager to wrest the word (if not the 1,45,000-word document behind the word) away from the opposition and co-opt it for themselves.
And, so, now we are to have a ‘Samvidhan Hathya’ day, harking back to the Emergency in 1975, a good eight years before the World Cup victory, with the Congress cast in the role of murderer-in-chief. This serves as an effective teaser campaign for the movie, Emergency, releasing in September, starring freshly minted BJP MP Kangana Ranaut, which in turn serves as an effective campaign for the elections due to be held in three states in the last quarter of 2024—Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand. Kangana is a gifted actress and I am sure she’ll do her best to make the hoary, almost 50-year-old cautionary tale of Indira Gandhi’s misdoings relevant to Gen Z. If anything, given their obsession with self-improvement, work-life balance, the inner workings of the mind, and all things new age-y and karmic, I think they would be much more interested in why she ended the Emergency when she could’ve you know, just continued being a hated but all-powerful despot. Unfortunately, I’m guessing that March 21, 1977, is not going to be correspondingly celebrated as Samvidhan Satya day or ‘the day the Samvidhan rose from the dead’ because introspection, climbing down, and admitting to a mistake are really not practices our rulers are interested in celebrating.
Coming back to June 25, I feel it should be kept sacred to cricket. After all, June 25, 1983, was our very own unforgettable, heady ‘Miracle at Lord’s’ and we’ve only won the ODI World Cup twice!
Meanwhile, the Samvidhan gets murdered in our country on a regular basis. I mean, there are so many dates they can pick and choose from if they really want to commemorate a Samvidhan Hatya Day. But then again, our current state of emergency is unofficial—we slid into it so slowly and insidiously that there’s no one, clear date on which the enslavement began. When exactly did the media begin to crawl, when did the persecution of the farmers begin, when precisely did our competitive exams get compromised, when did parliamentary candidates start winning elections without even having to stand for them, when did debates in Parliament become a thing of the past to be replaced by fiats and ordinances, and on which date did electoral bonds start hollowing out our democracy from within? Hmm, a tricky problem, this... But wait—oh good, I just thought of something! Let’s keep June 25 for Kapil paji, and commemorate December 6 as Samvidhan Hatya Diwas.
editor@theweek.in