Millennials can't meme and shame like Gen Z do. Will govt hear their ethanol pain?
On Saturday, the Union government surrendered to a cockroach. Not the insect, though the mascot was inspired, since a cockroach is the one creature you
On Saturday, the Union government surrendered to a cockroach. Not the insect, though the mascot was inspired, since a cockroach is the one creature you cannot stamp out by stamping on it. The Cockroach Janta Party began as a slur reclaimed, born when the Chief Justice was widely taken to have likened (he didn't) restless young Indians to vermin, and the young decided to wear the insult as a badge. Within weeks, the two-month-old joke had more Instagram followers than the ruling party itself, a meme army that turned a lathi charge into a reel and tear-gas cloud into content. They out-Modi-ed Modi on the very social media he built his brand on. They posted diapers to the Education Minister to help him plug the leaks. They called it Instagramming their revolution, and they were not wrong. Read Full Story For weeks, the government did the one thing it does best with the vocal unarmed: nothing. Then, on July 20, the students marched towards Parliament, and the state answered with force. Government "sources" swore on Friday evening that Dharmendra Pradhan would not move. By Saturday afternoon, he was gone. There is a lesson in that, and it is not about NEET. A deaf government is not a strong one. It is the only one that has not yet been made to listen. But notice what made it listen. Not the justice of the cause, which had not changed in weeks. Only the volume. This government is consistent. It does not weigh whether you are right. It weighs whether you can last and whether you can hurt. Shaheen Bagh sat through a Delhi winter, and the talk of a nationwide NRC quietly slid into cold storage, something nobody in power mentions any more. The farmers sat at the capital's gates for over a year, and three farm laws, defended with economics every bit as confident as any ethanol forex savings chart, were repealed with a rare prime-ministerial apology to the nation. And when the Supreme Court once rationalised the SC/ST Atrocities Act and a violent bandh erupted across the north, the government did not hold the line.
It passed an amendment that made the Act Draconian, overruling the judges within months. Read those three together and the pattern is clear: the decibels decide, merit gaya ethanol lene. The establishment ignores what it can afford to ignore and folds before what it has learnt to fear. It waves away the meek and the mannerly, however honest, and bends to the persistent and the violent, however unreasonable. That is classic bully behaviour. And every citizen has now read it. Which brings us to the quietest queue of all: the average bike and car owner at the petrol pump. He has none of the Cockroach flair. He has a job to reach, in the very vehicle he is worried about, which is precisely why he cannot camp at Jantar Mantar for a month to complain about it. He is the working Indian, salaried or self-employed, the man who saved for a second-hand hatchback and now suspects it is drinking more and going less. He has no viral following. He has a grievance, and it is real. And by the government's own revealed rule, he will be ignored, for the unforgivable crime of being polite and productive. Worse, the little he does say has been met with the Gadkari-Puri method: answer with a figure and call them technically ignorant. For months, the two ministers have replied to social media complaints with interviews and speeches about foreign exchange savings and income of farmers. Always, meant to end the conversation. A citizen expects communication, but he is lectured about the nutrition label while he keeps saying the food tastes off. Here is the awkward part: on the numbers, the government is right. India buys crude in quantities that cost lakhs of crores a year. Ethanol is a solution to the problem of rising import bills. By the government's own factsheet, blending has saved over Rs 1.90 lakh crore in foreign exchange since 2014-15 and substituted 310 lakh tonnes of imported crude. It has put more than Rs 1.6 lakh crore into farmers' hands, we don't know how, but let's believe the Modinomics.
The BriefWire