Nobody is safe until we all are.

"How do democracies die?" asked Prof John Keane. "Democide is usually a slow-motion and messy process." Democracy can end suddenly in a military coup d'etat as happened in Egypt (2013), Thailand (2014) and Myanmar and Tunisia (2021). "Less obvious is the way democracies are destroyed by social emergencies." When people are victimised and humiliated, "The powerless and the privileged join hands to wish for a messiah who promises to defend the poor, protect the rich, drive out the demons of corruption and disorder and purify the 'soul' of the people." "When this happens, demagoguery comes into season." "A thoroughly 21st century type of top down rule called despotism triumphs." "Might this be how democracy dies in India?" "The law in India has been weaponised by the state as the most effective tool of persecution of all those who dissent," wrote NC Asthana. "Far from being the most important 'service arm' of the state, the role of the law enforcement agencies, whether the state police, CBI, NIA, ED or NCB, etc., has been reduced essentially to the proverbial knock at the door of citizens, whisking them away, or implicating them in false cases that would see them running to the courts for years on end with their lives and livelihoods destroyed in the process." "The most effective method of subjugating the people in general and dissidents, in particular, is to hit them where it hurts the most -- deny them justice." This is nothing new. Politicians and civil servants have exercised unchallenged power over citizens without any accountability which culminated in the Emergency, imposed on the nation from 1975 to 1977, wikipedia, which, in turn, led to Morarji Desai being elected the first non-Congress prime minister of India from 1977 to 1979, wikipedia. Desai seemed to suggest that he was a "sanyasi who was suffering for the nation", wrote Vir Sanghvi. "What none of us realized was that the sanyasi had gathered up every secret file that he could get his hands on at the PMO (Prime Minister's Office) before they booted him out." He asked Arun Gandhi to wrote a book on his time as prime minister which would show how, "A decent, honourable Gandhian called Morarji goes to Delhi to do his duty as prime minister. He is thwarted in this desire by such demons as Charan Singh and Indira Gandhi," and yet he had stolen "a treasure trove of confidential communications, government files and secret letters." It is incidental that, "Shri Morarji Desai was born on February 29, 1896 in Bhadeli village, now in the Bulsar district of Gujarat," PM India. Paranoia is acute in this government. The Prime Minister "made two speeches in Parliament and in both he held forth against 'professional protesters' and said that the 'pure' protest of the farmers was being polluted by the appearance of this kind of 'parasite'. In his Rajya Sabha he sneered at what he described as a new kind of FDI. He said this acronym now means 'Foreign Destructive Ideology'," wrote Tavleen Singh. "Paranoia involves intense anxious of fearful feelings and thoughts often related to persecution, threat or conspiracy. Paranoia occurs in many mental disorders, but is most often present in psychotic disorders," Mental Health America. Since it is irrational, the reaction is to lash out at anyone who dares to disagree. People have family and friends and as anger grows so the degree of oppression must grow with it until it becomes uncontrolled, egregious brutality. Umberto Eco has written about "the intellectual-moral climate engendered by fascism in particular," and "though fascism has shown up in several different shapes and forms in different countries at different points in time", "we can still talk in terms of a common archetype of fascism", wrote Anjan Basu. "The bogey of the intruder, the 'other', is as potent a weapon in the hand of the Indian state today as it was in Hitler's," The Wire. Since paranoia is irrational nobody is safe. It's all or nothing.