Now the Regime and its cohorts have started on the job of destroying statues of Lenin (these exemplars of Sangh Parivar culture at one place even kicked around the head of one such statue like a football).
Soon, on March 23, these very gentlemen will be observing the 87th anniversary of the hanging of Bhagat Singh – a profoundly committed supporter of the man whose statues they are destroying. For Bhagat Singh to be paid homage by the likes of them is indeed a second, and worse, hanging of him and of his comrades.
Indeed, he would certainly have been deeply insulted that he has been exempted by these hoodlums from the same treatment they have given to Lenin. Perhaps he would have demanded that, rather than being garlanded by them, they bring his portraits and statues too under the axe – much as Bertolt Brecht, in the following lines, demanded of the book-burning Nazis:
The Burning of the Books
When the Regime commanded that the books with harmful knowledge
Should be publicly burned and on all sides
Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books
To the bonfires, a banished
Writer, one of the best, was shocked to find that his
Books had been passed over. He rushed to his desk
On wings of wrath, and wrote a letter to those in power
Burn me! he wrote with flying pen, burn me! Haven’t my books
Always reported the truth? And here you are
Treating me like a liar! I command you
Burn me![1]
[1] from Bertolt Brecht, Poems, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, with the cooperation of Erich Fried, 1976.
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