To
All the Delhi Police Personnel, and Army Personnel, who are detaining citizens and CJP peopLe, because they are running an ‘anti-democratic’ narrative;
- May your kids do not suffer when they don’t get medical seat, because some MLA’s child got it by paying more…
- May your family do not suffer from not getting your pension amount, if you get martyred in the Line Of Duty…
- May your kids do not get killed in the accident, because some richie-rich’s spoiled brat chose to drive Porshe in the Pune nights…
- May your daughter do not get raped, because our Dear Government chose to gave 21 paroles to the rape accused to promote elections…
- May you get enough salary, so that you do not suffer when you get entangled in the ‘chakravyuh’ of taxation…
May your DUTY saves you in THIS ‘DICTORIAL’ DEMOCRACY…
A Scene From Jantar Mantar : Duty in a Democracy That Treats Its Guardians Like Disposable Enemies
The message arrives like a curse written in blood and ink. It is addressed not to abstract institutions, not to “the system,” but to the individual human beings wearing the uniform of the Delhi Police and the Indian Army. It does not argue policy. It does not demand reform. It wishes suffering upon the families of those who detain citizens and activists for what the writer calls an “anti-democratic” narrative.
It is a catalogue of private nightmares offered as moral reciprocity: may your children be denied medical seats because an MLA’s child paid more; may your family wait forever for the pension of a martyred soldier; may your son or daughter die under the wheels of a rich boy’s Porsche; may your daughter be raped while the government releases the accused on parole to win elections; may the tax system crush you while you serve. And then the closing benediction, dripping with sarcasm: may your duty save you in this dictatorial democracy.
This is not satire. It is not rhetorical flourish. It is a offered emotional trauma. It takes real, documented failures of the Indian state- corruption in medical admissions, bureaucratic cruelty toward the families of the dead, elite impunity in road deaths, selective application of parole, the crushing weight of taxation on the salaried- and turns them into personalized hexes against the people tasked with enforcing order.
Consider the first curse. Medical seats. In India, the competition for MBBS seats is a national trauma. Year after year, reports surface of irregularities, coaching mafias, political pressure, and the quiet understanding that money and influence can open doors that merit cannot. When an ordinary family watches their child study until their eyes bleed only to lose a seat to someone whose parent sits in a legislature, the rage is real.
The message takes that rage and aims it at the police constable who may have detained a protester earlier that day. It does not ask why the system allows purchased merit. It asks the constable to imagine his own child suffering the same theft. The emotional logic is pure- if you protect the system that steals futures, hope the system, not steal your child’s future.
The second curse is colder. The pension of the martyred. Every few months a story emerges of a soldier’s widow fighting the bureaucracy for years to receive the benefits that were promised when her husband put on the uniform. Forms are lost. Files move at the speed of contempt. Officers who died in remote posts leave families negotiating with clerks who treat their grief as inconvenience.
The message does not propose faster processing or automatic entitlements. It simply says: may your family experience that particular hell if you die for the flag. It is an intimate form of psychological warfare, reminding the living that the state has a long memory for the living and a short one for the dead.
Then comes the Porsche. The reference is specific enough. In recent years, India has watched cases in which young men from wealthy families drive high-performance cars into crowds or other vehicles, kill, and then watch the machinery of justice slow to a crawl under the weight of influence. Bail is granted. Investigations are delayed. The dead are reduced to statistics while the living continue their lives of privilege. The message call for stricter traffic laws and equal application of justice, but what fate brings is quietly opposite. The emotional calculus is vicious; if you stand between the public and those who demand accountability, one day your own blood will pay the price of elite immunity.
The fourth curse is the most visceral. Rape. Parole. Elections. There have been documented instances in which men convicted or accused of sexual violence have received parole or early release in ways that raise questions about political timing and influence. The message collapses those cases into a single accusation, where the government releases rapists to harvest votes.
Then it turns the knife; hope your daughter may not be the next victim of that calculation. This is not policy critique. This is the weaponization of every parent’s deepest terror. It does not distinguish between individual officers and the political class that controls parole boards. It simply says that the system you serve has already decided that some women’s bodies are negotiable.
The taxation line is almost mundane by comparison, yet it lands with a different kind of weight. The salaried middle class in India, especially those in uniform, often feels trapped in a fiscal maze where compliance is mandatory and relief is theoretical. The message frames this as a “chakravyuh,” the mythical formation from which escape is nearly impossible. It suggests that the same state that demands loyalty from its enforcers will not hesitate to extract every possible rupee from them while the truly powerful find ways around the net. Again, may you escape from the squeeze until it breaks something in your household.
And then the final line. “May your DUTY saves you in THIS ‘DICTATORIAL’ DEMOCRACY.” Democracy, in this framing, is a costume worn by a dictatorship that uses the police and the army as its instruments. The duty that is supposed to be a source of pride is reframed as a trap. The uniform becomes both shield and target.
What makes the message disturbing is not that it invents grievances. The grievances exist. Corruption in professional education is real. The families of the fallen sometimes wait years for benefits. Elite impunity in road deaths is visible. Questions about the political use of parole are not fabricated. The tax burden on the formal sector is a frequent complaint. The message’s power lies in its refusal to aim these grievances at the actual centers of power, the politicians, the bureaucrats, the connected families, and instead redirect them downward onto the people who stand in the street, who man the checkpoints, who are ordered to detain.
This is a classic move in periods of high polarization. When institutions lose legitimacy, the individuals who staff those institutions become proxies for collective rage. The police constable becomes the face of every denied medical seat. The soldier becomes the face of every delayed pension. The individual in uniform is asked to carry the moral weight of systemic failure. The message does not seek to persuade these individuals to reform the system from within. It will make them feel that the system has already abandoned them, and that the only remaining reciprocity is mutual suffering.
There is a deeper cruelty here. Many of the people who join the police and the army come from the same socioeconomic strata that suffer the very injustices listed. They are not the children of MLAs. They are not the ones driving Porsches at night. They are often the ones whose families have sacrificed to put them in uniform precisely because the uniform still offers a path to dignity and relative security. It is to say: your loyalty buys you nothing. Your children’s futures are as precarious as anyone else’s. Your death will not be honored. Your daughter is not safe. Your salary will not protect you.
The message also reveals something about the current climate of political speech. In a functioning democracy, critique of detention practices, of the treatment of activists, of the selective application of law, can be made without descending into personalized curses. One can argue that certain arrests are excessive, that certain narratives are being suppressed, that the space for dissent is shrinking, without wishing rape and death upon the children of the enforcers. The choice to go there is itself a form of political statement. It declares that the normal channels of persuasion have failed, that the only remaining language is the language of reciprocal harm.
Yet the strategy is self-defeating in ways its author may not intend. When the people tasked with maintaining order are told that their families are fair targets for the same injustices they are ordered to protect, the result is not necessarily greater accountability. It can be greater cynicism, greater willingness to look the other way, greater identification with the very power structures that the message claims to oppose.
A constable who internalizes the idea that the system will not protect his children may conclude that the only rational course is to extract whatever personal advantage the system still allows. A soldier who believes his family’s pension is not secure may begin to calculate differently about risk. The words risks producing the very moral corrosion it claims to denounce.
There is also the question of selective outrage. The message focuses its fury on the detention of citizens and CJP-associated people for “anti-democratic” narratives. It does not address the broader context in which different political formations have, at different times, used state power against their opponents. It does not acknowledge that the same institutions have been accused of excess by groups across the spectrum. The moral universe of the message is binary: the detained are righteous, the detaining are complicit, and the families of the latter are legitimate objects of imaginative violence. Complexity is the first casualty.
What remains after the curses have been listed is a portrait of a society in which trust has eroded to the point that the only shared language left is the language of mutual threat. The police and the army are not invited into a conversation about reform. They are invited to contemplate the destruction of their private worlds.
In the end, the message is less a political argument than a psychological document. It records the moment when frustration with institutional failure becomes indistinguishable from a desire to see the agents of those institutions bleed in the same ways ordinary citizens already bleed. It is disturbing precisely because it is coherent within its own logic.
If the system is dictatorial, if duty is a trap, if the powerful are untouchable, then the only remaining power is the power to wish harm. That is a dark place for any polity to arrive at. It is darker still when the wishes are aimed not at the architects of the system but at the people who wear its uniform and still believe, however imperfectly, that the uniform means something.
