Mahua Moitra knows her Schopenhauer. “All truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed or distorted. Then she will be fought. And finally it is taken for granted,” she calls out to the Indian parliament. The truths proclaimed by the former J.P. Morgan banker and current leader of the opposition are at level one, sometimes level two. Whenever she attacks the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Moitra and her colleagues are interrupted by laughter, noise, screams and outright anger. Sometimes, like this week’s fourth attempt to elect a female mayor for Delhi, the opposition needs police protection.
This is the Indian reality these days. In power for almost nine years now, the Hindu nationalists around Prime Minister Narendra Modi rule with an iron fist. Last Sunday, around 15,000 people demonstrated in New Delhi against “a sharp increase in targeted hatred and violence against Christians,” reports the Vatican News. More and more critics are leaving the country. And the highly decorated author Arundhati Roy says of the greatest democracy on earth: “We are burning down our house. India is an experiment failing dangerously. It fails because our elected leaders are blinded by hatred – and paralyzed by a severe lack of intelligence, which is the more dangerous thing. The consequences are unimaginable.”