The recent Galgotias University faux pas at the AI Summit comes as a vindication of all the critics who pointed fingers at the government policies and questioned the "Vikaas" that Modiji promised at the beginning of the decade. His promises made over the decades must now sound hollow to everyone, even the most hardcore Modi fan, though some would still dare to believe.

The brazenness of displaying foreign technology as indigenous, and that too in an era when Internet accessibility is ubiquitous, and information is at everyone's fingertips, just a few taps away, should confound anyone with a modicum of discomfiture. Does not the complete disconnect of even the teacher from reality strike anyone as surreal? If such is the condition of the teachers in a university, what should we speak about the students?

Their previous misadventures do lend some precedence to the current happening. The university is openly right-aligned. Some time ago, their students marched voicing opposition to Congress. They were like deer caught in the headlights when asked about their protest. Not one of them had the slightest clue what was actually going on.

This, however, is not the case with a single university. The quality of education in the federation has more than noticeably gone down. While the Modi government claims it has built many new universities and colleges and increased the number of IITs, IIMs, and AIIMSes, the question remains: how? The government has been proclaiming structures as institutions of excellence all over the place. For it to be a place of excellence, there must be researchers at the forefront of knowledge in their respective fields, and an environment that stimulates and sustains such endeavours.

Bitter examples of this deplorable situation include the heads of institutions like the IIT making remarks about the medicinal properties of cow urine, the government-backed research on cow dung and urine, and the infamous fraud at Nanaji Deshmukh Veterinary Science University, Jabalpur, where the state-funded research on cow dung could not withstand a financial audit.

A cursory scroll through social media platforms reveals how blinded people are by the government's theatrics and blatant lies. It is sufficiently clear that the government is spending everything on optics to keep its throne safe. We have reached a point in our great nation where we have normalised the culture of confident denial.

Spectacle has replaced substance, explanations have replaced accountability, and we gamble that repetition, however absurd, can outbark reality, even on a global stage. Yet somehow we have also made ourselves believe that everyone else is blind as well. By conducting only theatrics with paid actors and blind bhakts, we are proving ourselves to be dullards.

We are like little children seeking praise from adults for actions that seem cute to us but, in reality, mean absolutely nothing. Jawaharlal Nehru and the other architects of India would certainly weep if they were to visit us today. All their dreams of building a nation at the vanguards of culture, science and thought have been systematically dismantled in the last decade. The disconsolate thought is that we may not have hit rock bottom yet.