When Derek O' Brien ripped apart ‘photo mantri’ Modi and suggested ‘DeMitronisation’

It’s the Budget session of Parliament and things are naturally hot and happening in the House. The only damp squib has been the Union Budget itself, with finance minister Arun Jaitley not even bothering to give the figures in support of the Modi government’s decision to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes on November 8, 2016, and pulling out 86 per cent of the currency in cash overnight.

Trinamool Congress MP from Rajya Sabha and a powerful orator, the quizmaster-in-chief Derek O’ Brien made quite an impression on Thursday evening, when he spoke in Parliament in a 40-minute speech. From ripping apart the “photo mantri” in Narendra Modi, to floating “DeMitronisation” as the solution to India’s woes, O’ Brien was spectacular and bold in his clinical dissection of demonetisation, Budget deficiencies and social media trolling.

Not only did O’ Brien criticise the government on not even acknowledging the 120 deaths so far that have occurred due to demonetisation-related stress, panic, anxiety and so on, he mentioned that in a country where four out of five villages remain unbanked, where 70-80 per cent of women have no bank accounts, the government’s decision was heartless and short-sighted.

He ridiculed how the excuse for demonetisation has gone from black money to terrorism, to corruption to push Digital India to increase tax net and now to boost the real estate sector hit by demonetisation itself. O’ Brien also said that the Modi government has come a long way from trashing MGNREGA to claiming, falsely, that it’s sanctioning the highest-ever fund allocation for the UPA-government era scheme, which has been long belittled by the right-wing commentariat.

O’Brien’s strongest criticism was reserved for Modi’s government’s “Digital India”, which the TMC MP said was basically a euphemism for “divisive India”. He named a couple of the 26 Twitter handles which have been known to send out extremely serious threats on social media, including rape threats to women journalists and propagating hate speech, but which are still followed by PM Narendra Modi.

Social media abuse is a strategy that is actively devised and followed by the ruling regime and its expansive dominion of online warriors, who intimidate, threaten and abuse to silence criticism from liberal sections of media, public sphere as well as the celebrities. O’ Brien mentioned the Aamir Khan-Snapdeal case as an example of how superstars are hounded for airing their grievances, while others are targeted and beaten up in the real world for reimagining history.

O’Brien also mentioned how the Rail Budget has been consigned to a terribly trivial status by merging it with the main Budget, which gives the government has opportunity to simply hide behind a few announcements and begin the shrinking of the world’s largest railway network. He mentioned how freight revenue has fallen, and how the Vision 20-20 document for Indian Railways, that had inputs from a number of former railway ministers, is now a distant dream, because of this government’s complete neglect of the railways.

In sum, O’Brien’s speech was a powerful intervention at a time when the election rhetoric is overriding every other form of resistance to the Modi government’s divisive agenda, and any opposition is simply being paraded, even by the media, as blasé opportunism. That is not correct at all.

As Derek O’ Brien appealed to all, it’s time to stand up and make our presence felt in a forceful manner. Because after Dalits, daily-wage workers, Muslims, farmers, there won’t be anyone left to speak up when the liberal elites too are targeted as inhumanly.

Also read: Arun Jaitley’s #UnionBudget2017 does little to clean up political funding