Article…
Badal Saroj…
Whatever they do, whenever they do it, they do it in a completely new and astonishing way. They can take any form, appear in any disguise, prostrate themselves anywhere at full length, and laugh, joke, and insist at any time.
They are not Nero, the king of Rome from the first century, not Muhammad bin Tughluq, the sultan of Delhi via Tughluqabad from the thirteenth century, and not Marie Antoinette, the empress of France from the seventeenth century. They are Modi of the twenty-first century and are an example unto themselves.
Starting from demonetization, they have brought their journey all the way to vote-banning. In the meantime, clapping and banging plates were done, candles were lit. The country’s economy was brought to ruin, and India, which was once the natural leader of half the world’s countries, was brought down to the level of Liberia. They are so overwhelmed by the feeling that “the fakir still has clothes on his body / the desires of the city’s rich have yet to emerge somewhere” that they have decided not to leave any stone unturned.
This same intense feeling first manifested at a public rally in Hyderabad on May 10, and then, to prove that it was not a suddenly irresponsible thing, it was repeated the next day at rallies including Vadodara.
As was feared, as soon as the assembly elections of five states ended, the government would bring a new shower of calamities, and that is exactly what happened. Even before the vote counting was complete, a hike of almost a thousand rupees was made on commercial gas cylinders and the businesses of millions of small shopkeepers were put in trouble.
Even before the new governments were sworn in, Modi himself announced a new package of attacks on the people from all sides with his own mouth. In this prescription that came with the mantra of ‘Duty is paramount in crisis’, the seven-step duties that the country’s Prime Minister has told the people include: using petrol-diesel with restraint, going out less, using public transport more, and working from home as during the Corona period, stopping gold purchases in any form including weddings for up to one year, not going abroad for at least one year, also reducing the use of cooking oil, reducing the use of fertilizers and chemical fertilizers in agriculture and returning to natural farming, not buying foreign goods, emphasizing swadeshi, and so on and so forth.
In many senses, these are measures that go further even than the steps taken during the Covid epidemic, without any epidemic at all. As soon as the announcement was made, Modi himself openly set about tearing these to shreds.
At the Hyderabad rally where he was directing people to reduce the use of petrol and diesel, he had reached the stage of that rally after doing a road show of a full 18 kilometers, and after roaring here, he reached Jamnagar directly in the evening and did another road show.
The next day on May 11, even after doing a road show in Somnath, he was not satisfied, so in the evening in Vadodara, he himself set out in an open procession on the road again to be seen by the people as Janardan.
The Prime Minister’s road show convoy includes more than 10 security vehicles including SPG personnel armed with state-of-the-art weapons, jammer vehicles, and ambulances. In addition to this, there are 50 to 100, sometimes even more, cars. This is the number of vehicles in the convoy moving with the Prime Minister.
Apart from this, the vehicles of security checkpoints set up every 200 meters and the vehicles for bringing and taking the security forces standing there are separate.
Overall, more oil was burned in one road show than the total oil consumption of a medium-sized city. And that too within just twenty-four hours of publicly advising the entire country to cut back. Not satisfied even with this, the 75th anniversary of the Somnath temple — of how old is not known — was celebrated, and on this occasion an air show was also held in Somnath, in which 6 Hawk Mk aircraft of the country’s air force, considered extremely special, made the shape of a ‘heart’ in the sky while releasing smoke in the colors of the tricolor above the temple, and showered flowers on the temple. Thousands of people had been gathered to enjoy this fireworks-like spectacle, and it is obvious that they had not come on foot.
It was not only Modi who was making such a mockery of his own appeal for conservation of petroleum products — his entire family was engrossed in it. All 20 BJP chief ministers traveled in their own planes to attend the swearing-in ceremony of the BJP chief minister installed in Kolkata. More or less the same kind of fair happened in Guwahati at the time of Himanta Vishwa Sharma’s swearing-in.
The small ones are not ready to appear lesser than the big ones. In Madhya Pradesh, for a simple position, the newly appointed chairman of the M.P. Textbook Corporation arrived in Bhopal from Ujjain with a massive convoy of 700 vehicles to take charge of his post.
After all these spectacles, the Prime Minister who advised not to travel abroad is himself setting off from May 15 on a tour of 5 countries — United Arab Emirates, Sweden, Netherlands, Norway, and Italy — to watch foreign spectacles. This is not merely a matter of being ‘expert in preaching to others’.
This is a display of that new India in which the slogan of ‘Duty is paramount’ for bearing the burden of crisis is only for the people, not for the rulers. This is the next stage of the rapidly pursued efforts over the last 12 years to transform citizens into subjects.
The feeling of contempt and disregard towards ordinary people is becoming more and more grotesque. It is the pinnacle of the shamelessness that arose from gaining immunity from any kind of criticism or review or accountability after establishing complete dominance over the media.
The arrogance is such that no explanation is even given for how, after boasting until yesterday that there is no shortage of any kind, no crisis at all, one has suddenly arrived in a crisis like Corona today.
The absurdity is such that on one side the Prime Minister is crying out about shortages, while on the other side his own petroleum minister is claiming that there is adequate stock.
The first thing is that the calamity being talked about has not come on its own — it has been properly invited by succumbing to Trump’s threats. Oil purchases from Iran, the oldest and most trusted country, were stopped; the pipeline that was to be laid from Iran directly to India was halted midway.
In the next threat, the purchase of cheap oil from Russia was also stopped. A ship carrying 60,000 tonnes of Russian liquefied natural gas — LNG — for India’s chemical fertilizer manufacturing factories in April was stopped midway.
Here Modi is taking the farmers’ agriculture back to a primitive age by appealing to them to reduce the use of fertilizers and chemical fertilizers, while there the tanker named ‘Kunpeng’ is still wandering in the sea.
The second and equally important thing is the shortsightedness and bankruptcy in the matter of safe oil storage. The world knows that oil is the most important factor in running the wheels of the economy. All countries store it in adequate quantities.
China has a stock of approximately 1.4 billion barrels. This is more than the total combined capacity of America, Japan, and many European countries. Of this, approximately 360 million barrels are with the government and 1 billion barrels with national oil companies.
After that comes America’s turn, which has the world’s second largest stock, with a capacity of approximately 413 million barrels. Japan is in third place with approximately 263 million barrels. European countries have a total stock of approximately 179 million barrels.
Among all of these, what is the situation of India, which is the world’s third largest oil consumer? Its strategic oil storage capacity is only 39.1 million barrels. This capacity is less than half of a country like South Korea’s 79 million barrels. As of March 2026, these stocks are also only about 64% full.
On this entire capacity of ours, India’s strategic reserve can only meet approximately nine and a half days of national consumption. Over the last 12 years, Adani and Ambani kept buying oil here and selling it around the world — arrangements were made for that — but no attention was paid to increasing the country’s own storage capacity.
This is not a sudden mistake or negligence — this is the result of pro-corporate policies. Instead of taking responsibility for it, all the burden is now being loaded onto the people.
By telling everyone to work from home, Prime Minister Modi has proved that he has absolutely no knowledge of what work means. More than 95 percent of the work in this country is done not by mobile or internet but directly by hands using tools. Without physical presence, neither production is possible, nor is any kind of construction possible. Even seemingly small everyday necessities like vegetables, milk, and groceries cannot be done while sitting at home.
Economies of countries do not run on video conferencing and online meetings. Modi did give the example of the Covid period, but forgot to say that during that time the businesses of approximately 150 million people of this country had shut down. About one-third of these businesses never started again.
The medicine he has come with to get out of the crisis arising from his government’s America-phobia and utter failure of foreign policy is more deadly than the disease itself.
His ‘advice’ of not buying gold for up to one year alone has the power to destroy the livelihoods of 5 million people in the country and to trap gold shopkeepers in a debt trap from which they can never escape.
A similarly absurd thing is telling farmers to stop using fertilizers and chemical fertilizers and return to natural farming. This shows that the honorable gentleman knows nothing about this country’s agriculture, nor does he remember the devastating consequences of the same foolish experiment of natural farming in the neighboring country of Sri Lanka.
But he also knows that the prescriptions he has given in the seventh note can give birth to great discontent.
That is why in his speeches filled with the poison of communal hatred — featuring fabricated stories of the imaginary exploits of Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, who served as a minister in the Muslim League government, and the rhyming slogans of Anga, Banga, Kalinga, Suryodaya, and Purvouday — he does not forget to abuse workers’ strikes.
To deal with these strikes, he calls upon even the judiciary to keep an eye on their leaders and to support such matters. He harbors the misconception that the Left has been finished off.
The root of the problem is that when the Prime Minister of our country declared himself non-biological — meaning directly descended to Earth — many outraged people did not accept his claim. They went so far as to have the audacity to mock him. And it is from that very moment that he has been putting all his energy into making people believe it.
Whether or not he can achieve this purpose, one thing he has proved is that he is an example unto himself. He has surpassed those who were previously called and considered an example unto themselves — Nero, Tughluq, and Marie Antoinette. He is their enhanced and augmented edition. The welfare that those three brought to the people of their respective countries through their whims has been recorded in history.
