Malay Mishra
In the climax scene of the iconic film Joker which fetched that year’s Academy award for its lead actor, the protagonist after shooting dead the anchor point blank, one he had idolised all his life, on a live interview set to the utter incredulity and horror of the global audience, proudly walks out of the television set with an incredibly sardonic laugh. Arrested by the police and passing through the streets of New York, the so-called Gotham City, the police vehicle crashes into an oncoming van and the Joker comes out all bloody and bruised to a heroic ovation by thousands of jokers who had rebelled against the system and at last found their voice.
The Joker in the memorable Todd Philips-directed movie is an out-of-the-margins rebel who laughs incessantly taking his life to be a comedy and bludgeons those he deems are the power elites or their collaborators, his way of fighting systemic tyranny and misery inflicted on the underprivileged. The Joker in this perspective could be the voice of the oppressed avenging the taunts and caprices of those who have overrun the society with their collusion with levers of power in a strangulated world.
Cut to 2021, India and the dreaded double mutant of the coronavirus scientifically jargonised B.1.617, and now with the addition of a third mutant.
If the mayhem necessitated by abysmal negligence and mismanagement laced with a false sense of complacency and triumphalism is any indication, scores of Covid-ravaged bodies lying in wait at the innumerable morgues, crematoria and makeshift burial grounds with thousands running from hospital to hospital in search of beds, anti-virals, vaccines and oxygen show succinctly how the Indian healthcare system has plummeted to its lowest depths, to the point of a virtual collapse. Ironically it is the people who had reposed their trust in their elected representatives who formed the governments at the Centre and states assuredly to take care of their welfare, their lives and their future.
Nary it was to be. No questions were to be asked, questions demanding accountability for having wrecked the nation and the wellbeing of millions of its citizens. The same people, sick and tired, have lost faith in themselves as the father sees a young son dying, a daughter holds her dying mother in her arms, a child waiting for oxygen to be pumped into her lungs as the last breath ebbs away, hospitals in flames, states not letting oxygen vans pass through. The fate of a glorious republic, born out of the embers of innumerable sacrifices and ideals of visionaries to usher in a new India in the struggle against colonialism, today lies in tatters. Literally in flames.
The smoldering smoke rising out of the funeral pyres amidst the heaps of bodies lying scattered all over the place seem surreal, refuse to awaken the collective conscience of the nation if it was still there. Who is to bear accountability for this horrific human disaster unleashed in front of a cowering population and played out in macabre detail in the global media? The image of a nation founded on the values of pluralism, secularism and respect for democratic rights seems utterly destroyed. It took a virus and the resultant lack of preparedness to bring about the catharsis in minutiae. The venerable institutions, which have built up the edifice of the world’s largest democracy founded on Abraham Lincoln’s stirring Gettysburg address that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”, have ceased to perform their constitutionally mandated roles.
It bears constant reiteration that the glorious constitution of our land starts with the people. “We the people”, it opens, “do hereby adopt, enact, and give to ourselves this constitution”, it proclaims. But where are the people? Why are their voices stifled amidst these dreary scenes of injustice and monumental apathy?
Where are our elected representatives, the courts, the legislatures, the commissions and directorates, the media and civil society, those denizens of the society whose complicity in this game of opacity and silence may never be forgiven, least of all forgotten. The ugly masquerade of religious shibboleths and the incomprehensible political rituals of elections, supposedly “free and fair” as envisaged by our constitution-makers, all vying to break up the society or at least unleash a thousand cuts on the body politic spreading yet another deadlier virus would be the execrable parody while a nation goes berserk in this disastrous pantomime of delusion and destruction.
This is not the society which we, the people, deserve. Certainly not, unless we choose to be the Jokers of Gotham City.
The writer is a retired diplomat and holds a doctorate in social justice.