"Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves…. The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings." (Julius Caesar)

My story is about Bholistan, a dystopian country eerily like ours, brimming with injustice and oppression! For a whole decade and more, that benighted land has been ruled by a Feku - cruel, mendacious, boorish and wrapped up in himself. He has wielded untrammelled power that he has used to tyrannise and bamboozle his people, who have meekly submitted to his every command as he wrecks their world – values, kinship, institutions – for his own gain and that of his cohorts.

The special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Maghda is the latest atrocity that Feku has inflicted on his people. From being a vocal critic of the universal Uphaar identity card scheme before coming to power in 2014 calling it a "political gimmick," he pushed the Uphaar Act through the legislature in 2016 and since then had made it mandatory for all kinds of purposes including filing of income tax returns, availing of government welfare schemes, getting a passport, opening a bank account, as identity for voting and what have you.

But now Feku and his factotums in the National Electoral Commission (NEC) have decided to pull the rug from under the people's feet. The long-suffering citizens, whose lives are being disrupted repeatedly on account of Feku's harebrained or mischievous schemes, have been told that the Uphaar card is no longer proof of citizenship or date of birth.

With the upcoming Maghda election in mind and with the obvious but unstated intent of excluding dadi-topiwalas and the marginalised from the electoral process, the NEC has completed the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Maghda, but not before shockingly deciding that the Uphaar, voter ID and ration cards are not valid indicative documents for voter registration.

Consequently, a huge swathe of the electorate has been disenfranchised. Out of 7.40 crore electors, as many as 80 lakh have been denied the vote. A cute labrador, though, was issued a residence certificate, thereby demonstrating the unbridled power of the NEC to cull and hand-pick the electorate.

The Feku regime has indeed found an ingenious way of "disappearing" people whose loyalties are uncertain, which reminds one of George Orwell's dystopian novel '1984' that described the Party's practice of making inconvenient individuals disappear from society, history and memory, effectively turning them into 'unpersons.'

It's surreal, the way Feku has been trampling all over his country's Constitution and the values that underpin it, even as the guardians of the Constitution - the judiciary - hem and haw but then do his bidding! And his people are mute!

Given Feku's dodgy educational credentials, the rumour that he keeps a copy of Mein Kampf by his bedside is probably apocryphal. What is indubitable, though, is that he has somehow imbibed the Führer's tips on how to propagate the Big Lie: "The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small but their power of forgetting enormous…all effective propaganda must be limited to a few points and must harp on these in slogans." The Great Dictator also commended the art of lying: "Great liars are also great magicians." Feku has acted decisively on this advice!

He is a past master at catchy sloganeering, simplistic and misleading. His theme song of solidarity, trust and cohesive progress is expressed in the slogan: sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas! It is perhaps Feku's most outrageous falsehood of all because the same individual has spearheaded the campaign of hate against the dadi-topiwalas. His sneering rhetoric of humare paanch unke pachees, kabristan-shamshan ghat, et. al. has been lethally effective in creating a deeply polarised society and reducing the minorities to second-class citizens.

The media, the institutions of governance and even the citizenry have been doormats submitting to his every dangerous whim and fancy. Political observers still can't get over how he imperiously orchestrated the country-wide banging of thalis and lighting of candles to ward off the coronavirus. Never in human history have Asatya, blind worship and rank stupidity been so all-pervasive and public!

Feku's flow of falsehoods is steady and endless. Sanguine in the belief that they will fall for anything he says, he has been lying to his teeth on matters big and small. In 2020, he declared Bholisthan open defecation-free, although even today bare bottoms line the horizon at dawn and dusk in parts of the country's capital city, Indrahastha.

He promised that by 2022, every family would have a pucca house despite knowing that it would take decades to fulfil this fanciful commitment. The gullible janta are duped into believing his chimerical Viksit Bholistan pipe dream centred around Yuva, Garib, Mahilayen and Annadaata!

His mendacity, bad intent, complete absence of vision and monumental incompetence have left the country in a hole. Who can forget the suicidal Demonetisation disaster that shaved a good 3 percent off the GDP and rendered millions unemployed; the enactment of the CAA and anti-conversion laws with the intent of to reducing the minority community to second class citizens; the catastrophic handling of the pandemic that killed more than 4 million of his people and yet had Feku unblushingly claim credit for successfully handling the crisis; the flagrant falsification of statistical indicators of performance; the rigging of history; the mealy-mouthed obfuscation with regard to the Chinese illegal occupation of huge tracts of his country's land; the diminution in ethical standing of every institution including the judiciary and the armed forces; the calamitous leadership during the recent three-day war codenamed Operation Vermilion against Dukhistan that seriously compromised the safety and effectiveness of his armed forces and diminished the international standing of Bholistan; and to top it all, all elections are rigged, ensuring Feku's reign in perpetuity!

Despite committing crimes that would have sent any ordinary criminal to the gallows, Feku is still the most popular leader of his country by a long way. According to an 'Apsos' study in November 2024, 7 in 10 of his people approve of Feku's performance as leader. What does this say about them?

Thomas Jefferson, among others, had observed that people get the governments they deserve. The nature of a government depends on the civic engagement, values and political awareness of the citizens. Sadly, the most powerful segment of civil society, the key opinion makers of Bholisthan - the self-serving middle class and the corporates - have sold their souls to the regime, and along with their political benefactors, are fattening off the land. The rest, mainly the poor and the working class who have in the past unseated tyrants using the power of their vote, are now crippled by the machinations of Feku and his minions.

What's clear as day is that so long as Feku is around, Bholisthan can never recover its democratic essence or its humanity. But then, hope can spring from the most unexpected quarter! There are confirmed reports of a fierce internecine battle for power within Feku's cabal that could bring him down. Amen to that!