We are having a wonderful time, they tell us.

The Indian government deliberately practices disinformation to hide its failures by confusing the people, wrote Gautam Bhatia. The government claimed a growth rate of 6.6% when the actual figure was 4.5%, it claimed that its program of providing free school meals was a resounding success when a UN survey found that rural India has larger number of children with malnutrition than Sub-Saharan Africa, and claimed that Delhi's water is safer than most European cities when it was found to be polluted. "India is like a large unwieldy prison, in which the warden carefully filters news of the outside world and makes it more palatable for consumption. The idea is to insure that the inmates are not left uninformed or out of touch, but are given incoherent and competing views of the larger perspective." Apparently, not everyone believes these fairy tales. "Nearly 10,000 Indians were detained in the US in 2018 by law enforcement agencies as part of their operations to identify and remove aliens who present a danger to national security or are a risk to public safety, according to a government report." Indians pay Rs 2.5-3 million each to people smugglers to be helped to enter the US illegally. Clearly, if they are willing to pay a fortune and risk the lives of their children, they are not buying the canards put out by the government. Last month a woman veterinarian was gang-raped and murdered in Hyderabad by four men. On 6 December, all four accused were shot dead by the police during a reconstruction of the crime scene. The police claim that the men snatched weapons from them and began shooting forcing the police to return fire, killing all four. Extra judicial killing is common in India and is known as "encounter". While the nation rejoiced, "many judges and columnists expressed dismay at police vigilantism, saying it violated human rights and the rule of law," wrote SSA Aiyer. "The Supreme Court on Thursday appointed a three-member inquiry commission headed by former SC judge VS Sirpurkar to conduct a probe into alleged encounter killings of the four men accused in the gang-rape and murder of a veterinarian in Telangana." "Sorry, but the real culprit is a moribund judicial system that simply does not deliver what can reasonably be called justice," wrote Aiyar. The public supports encounters because of its contempt of the judicial system. Why were the men able to snatch weapons from the police? Because the Supreme Court banned the use of handcuffs for criminals as a violation of their human rights. Police have to apply for judicial permission to handcuff dangerous criminals, making it easy for them to escape. Courts take years to deliver a verdict, often after the death of the plaintiff. The gang-rape and gruesome murder of a young woman in a Delhi bus in 2012 created a furious outrage in the whole nation and the adult perpetrators were sentenced to death by hanging. In a mockery of the system, one of the men has appealed to the Supreme Court to convert the death penalty to life in prison because pollution in Delhi will be lethal in the long run anyway. When the nation is a prison the guilty have all the rights. Citizens obey in silence.