A stunning verdict was delivered on Aadhaar Wednesday. It wasn’t the one by the Supreme Court. It came from that greatest court of the “people” these days: Google Trends, which tells you what is it that we are interested in, or searching. Given how much Aadhaar had dominated our minds, you would have expected it to be the top trend.
It was, probably, for a few fleeting moments now and then. But mostly, it struggled to be in the top 10 — beaten by such vital interests as Ajay Devgn and Hazel Keech at No. 5 and 6.
What did it mean on a day when the Supreme Court delivered a rare, wise judgment, weighing in with technology, science, modern governance tools and the tough choice of the larger common good versus the last man standing? That “unique” doesn’t have to be the “best” is a more literary way of reiterating that pragmatic wisdom: Good is not the enemy of the best.
Then why is nobody bothered, barring, the about 3,229 (remember I made up that number, with some exaggeration) Aadhaarophobes? Some of these are mourning defeat, some searching for shards of victory out of the wreckage, and promising to fight another day.
Here’s my question: Was anybody really bothered, barring in the tiny echo chamber of voices that feed on and amplify each others’, crying havoc in the name of the poor multitudes, who they know nothing about?
The Indian intellectual-Left elites’ cognitive understanding of the Indian poor is about as good as the last seminar she attended at one of New Delhi’s vegetating intellectual hangouts where cross-fertilisation of ideas is viewed with deep suspicion and the “other” view is necessarily immoral, stupid, compromised, corrupt and funded by evil corporates. Or, how come so few Indians are interested in what was built up into the greatest challenge to our liberties since the Emergency?
There will be murmurs in the English-language press for a few days. If you watch Hindi, and other languages, which a vast majority of India consumes, it will disappear in 48 hours, max.
That’s the gap between the elites and our little planet that thinks and speaks in English, feeds off Western debates and fads, and real India. Our is the universe that proudly cites Julian Assange and Edward Snowden as our champions of liberty. Fifty metres away from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India International Centre, India Habitat Centre or the Press Club of India, 999 out of 1,000 won’t know who these two “free speech” icons are.