#Rules for chinese checkers full
In the week that the dogged fact-checker Zubair faced the full force of the law, ministers and others in India went about making fantastical claims about the past and changing historical records in textbooks. Of the cases against him, the most ridiculous one pertains to his tweet of 2018 in which he used a grab from a 1983 Hindi film which played on the words “Honeymoon” and “Hanuman”. Zubair’s case has drawn international attention with Germany, among other nations, calling out India for the treatment meted out to him. It's a scandal, a mockery of the basic principles of justice and ethics, that fact-checkers like Mohammed Zubair face a litany of cases for doing the thankless job they do in the interest of preserving truth, while the people they called out for bare-faced lies or hate speech barely face the law. Those who lived through those harrowing few years and are witness to the present-day events have remarked that this undeclared Emergency is as bad, if not worse, than the dark days of India’s democracy.
The only comparable time would be the internal Emergency declared by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in June 1975 and lifted nearly two years later. India’s truth-tellers – journalists, writers, cartoonists, filmmakers, comedians, political and social activists – have been at odds with the government of the day but it can be safely averred that they have never been as harassed, hounded and hunted down as in the last few years. Factual truth has been under attack for longer than we care to remember, its history goes well beyond the Vietnam war of course, but what Arendt was pointing towards then has remarkable resonance in present-day India: Factual truth is usually in danger and factual truth has always been in a battle against political power. “Facts and events” wrote philosopher Hannah Arendt, “are infinitely more fragile things than axioms, discoveries, theories which are produced by the human mind.” Arendt’s remark came in response to the lies and half-truths that were told to people about America’s war in Vietnam, the truth of which emerged later in the Pentagon Papers.
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