Perhaps Medusa should apologise

It seems an FIR has been filed against Miss Medusa under Section 152, which deals with acts endangering India’s sovereignty and unity. Her content – a recent tweet and video – apparently disturbs the peace in India.

For starters, I didn’t know we had peace in India. Didn’t we all, very recently, watch the massacre of tourists in Pahalgam? What does that sort of violence do to a nation? Does it leave any peace in anyone’s heart when one realises that their own family could have been victims of this cowardly attack?

The attack didn’t happen near the border. It didn’t happen in the vicinity of ongoing conflict. It happened in an allegedly safe tourist spot. The ones you blame for it are obviously the ones who committed the murderers. But the ones you demand accountability from are not the terrorists.

How is it that an Indian state, whose charge is directly under the Central government, whose safety has been vouched for by the Home Minister himself, frequently undergoes brazen terrorist attacks that take the lives of military personnel as well as civilians?

It was somebody’s job to make sure this doesn’t happen, right? It is someone’s responsibility to keep the people of this country safe, correct? When a house gets robbed, you do not expect responsibility and integrity from the criminals (because they are criminals). You have those expectations from the chaukidar.

Are we living in some bizarre upside-down reality where the ones hired to do a job become more important than the people who hired them? A reality where you put someone in charge of protecting your freedom and then they take your freedom away for asking that they do their job?

Or perhaps it is we who have it all backwards. Perhaps India’s sovereignty doesn’t mean what we think it means. Perhaps it has nothing to do with our rights, our freedoms, and our lives. Perhaps Medusa should apologise for thinking that her life matters, that her family’s safety matters, that anyone or anything other than this government’s reputation matters.

Perhaps it is not this government’s job to make sure that Indians are free and safe inside India and we should all just accept that the only reason we exist is to praise it and sit by quietly as our families are massacred.