Freedom™ in India: Now Available with Terms & Conditions

 

Freedom™ in India: Now Available with Terms & Conditions

Hindi Version: https://rakeshinsightfulgaze.blogspot.com/2025/11/blog-post_28.html

We love to romanticize freedom of thought, expression, and action as if these are blank cheques handed to every citizen just for showing up to vote. Spoiler: they’re not. And in today’s India, these freedoms aren’t just limited, they’re being actively rewritten, rebranded, and algorithmically filtered.

Let’s start with a painful irony: India, the birthplace of Vedic thought, once defined freedom more clearly than any Western textbook ever did. The Vedas encouraged open debate. The Upanishads celebrated introspection. Our Sabhas invited dissent. We understood that freedom of thought, expression, and action must exist in balance thousands of years before anyone in the West dreamed of a “republic.”

But today? The very civilization that pioneered liberty is now being governed by those who fear it.

Freedom of Thought is the last frontier still unchained. It's the one realm no regime has managed to colonize (yet). Governments can raid offices, censor films, ban books, and flood your phone with propaganda, but they can’t yet read your mind. It’s the last pocket of resistance, powered by reason, memory, and instinct.

Freedom of Expression? That bridge between thought and speech? It’s now riddled with toll booths, patrolled by party loyalists, and monitored 24/7 by trolls with official tags. If you’re a BJP leader, feel free to scream hate, spread lies, and insult opponents; that's called “leadership.” But if an opposition MP questions the Prime Minister, they risk disqualification, defamation, or even detention. Freedom, it seems, is now a one-way microphone.

Even the animal kingdom gets this. In the jungle, the strongest don’t roar all the time; they roar when needed. In India’s political jungle, though, it’s the loudest chest-thumper who gets the headlines, while facts lie buried under layers of noise and nationalism. At least lions don’t pretend to be saints.

Action? Now for the chosen few.

Freedom of Action is supposed to be bound by law, the clearest guardrail in any democracy. But here? It's not just eroded, it’s been auctioned off.

  • The Election Commission is no longer independent; it’s curated.
  • Electoral bonds funneled almost all donations to the BJP through anonymous, untraceable channels.
  • Public assets have been liquidated like yard-sale leftovers to billionaire friends.
  • Opposition leaders are arrested without charges, smeared without evidence.
  • Media is muzzled, bought, and raided.

And now, we’ve entered a darker zone altogether: voter suppression by design.

Millions of legitimate voters, mostly from opposition strongholds, have been deleted from the electoral rolls not by accident, but by SIR (Systematic Integrated Roll revision) and other digital tools. Voter data, once a neutral record, is now a weapon. If your profile suggests you might vote against the regime, you might just vanish on election day. No SMS, no warning, no appeal.

This is not a technical glitch. This is digital disenfranchisement at scale.

Let’s not sugarcoat it: in a democracy, the vote is the highest form of expression. To delete that is not just theft, it’s erasure. And when the courts stay silent, and the media stays bought, what’s left of the Republic?

Power rewrites the rules.

Those at the top enjoy every freedom to lie, to loot, to silence. Not because they deserve it, but because they rigged the system to allow it. In China, Russia, and North Korea, absolute power wears a frown. In India, it wears a smile, folds its hands, and quotes the Gita.

And the great irony…

The tragedy is not just what we've lost, but what we once were. India didn’t borrow the idea of freedom. It built it. The Vedic civilization spoke of dialogue, duty, and dharma long before the world found the word “democracy.”

But now? Those who chant its name the loudest are the ones killing its meaning the fastest.

Freedom was never supposed to be limitless. But it was supposed to be fair.

And when only the rulers are free, and the ruled are gagged, jailed, or erased from the voter list
freedom is no longer a right. It’s a performance.

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