India's measure of "vikaas" can be seen in its treatment of the people who dedicatedly contribute most to it. Incontrovertibly, it is the Christian community in India that has played a pivotal role in its growth in terms of personnel and resources to output and more often than not in the face of waves of discrimination and persecution.

There is a positively ancient adage that goes "do not bite the hand that feeds you." While the sentiment is thousands of years old, the earliest English-language recordings are attributed to the poet Samuel Butler in 1711. The import of the adage is plain as the day, no good person or at least one that lays claim to goodness, can betray another, whether by principle or by self-laid constraints.

Two Catholic nuns, accompanied by eight women aspirants from their congregation, were detained by police at a railway station in Madhya Pradesh on suspicion of human trafficking and alleged religious conversion. While they were released owing to swift intervention, the loss of time, money and above all the trauma inflicted is despicable to say the least.

While rabid saffron mobs did not hound them as in the case of the detention of two sisters in Durg, such an incident without widespread coverage and the silence of the victims out of fear highlights that the majority in India have chosen to actively or passively accept the venom spread by the saffron gang, blinded by religion. What remains then is reaping a harvest of hatred, where blood will flow like rivers.

In conjunction with the FCRA Amendment, clearly targeting the Christians (momentarily laid aside for the BJP to win elections), the attack on Christian schools and institutions, which have never had anything short of a stellar repute, the veto against the recognition of Dalit Christians, among other offensives and omissions against the minority community, it suffices to say that India is stooping to ever deeper lows.

To claim that Christians are converting people by hook or by crook, when their religion clearly states that there can be no true conversion without belief, is to question the intelligence and cognition of the Indian Intelligence. Why has there been no conviction in court despite draconian laws being passed helter-skelter across states?

It solely serves to doubly challenge the Indian mindset when actual criminals roam free hand in hand with the administration and the law enforcement, and when the judiciary, which claims to harbour the top minds of the nation, refuses to acknowledge injustice being perpetrated and chooses to stand with it.

What then remains of a Republic that prides itself on civilisation and constitutional morality, when suspicion is sanctified, and prejudice is paraded as patriotism? Institutions that ought to protect instead persecute. While many assert that silence is being weaponised as complicity to make it more palatable, we must face the truth: silence is complicity.

Our beloved country, nourished by the quiet, selfless service of many, is being bartered for fleeting political gain. The nation must ask itself: will it continue down this path of moral erosion, or reclaim the conscience that once made it worthy of emulation?