Shackled, bound and fettered, heads bowed, they stumbled out of the American military aircraft.

Our brothers, our sisters, our children, thrown back, in an undignified manner, by a President and a people who considered them unworthy of their land.

The majority from Gujarat, the prime minister’s home state, the others from other parts of India.

Later, in weary, hushed tones, they spoke about forty-kilometre treks through jungles, scaling impossible hills, and crossing treacherous rivers.

Of danger, risk and peril and then alas, their capture.

They spoke of days in near inhuman captivity in a land where a statue known as Liberty spoke to those who entered her shores saying, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.’

And in all probability believing her words, they entered the US, only to be deported in the most inhuman manner possible.

Some say, the US was retaliating on hearing India’s drive to throw out Bangladeshis. Maybe the reason why our suave Foreign Minister, instead of bristling with rage like the heads of Mexico and Columbia, who roared with anger at the treatment to their countrymen, explained gently to Parliament that, these dastardly, terrible and inhuman acts of being chained like criminals, by the second largest democracy in the world, was ‘ladies and gentlemen well within their law’.

Or maybe, his soft approach was because we, the largest democracy in the world, were doing exactly the same, not to illegals from across borders but to our very own.

That just as our own who crossed over to the US were treated like ‘others’ we treat millions of our own as ‘others’ too.

Imprint in your minds with a branding iron, the picture of our own Indians stepping out, shackled, bound and fettered, and realise that this is the same way legal citizens, not illegals, are being made to feel here in their own country, with laws that jail them for love jihad and religious conversions.

And with polarisation that makes them feel as alienated as those in the military aircraft were made to feel.

That just as they were fooled by the words on the Statue of Liberty, so also legal citizens are looking at the Constitution of India and wondering why it remains silent.

As silent as our foreign minister.

But, from today, let that picture of our beloved Indians, the majority from Gujarat, and the rest from elsewhere in India, be branded in our minds.

Branded, so that ‘tit for tat’, as said in the US, or Karma as we in India believe, will not be thrown at us, when we retaliate against inhuman acts such as this, against our beloved own.

They were shackled, bound and fettered by a foreign power, let’s stop doing so to our own..!

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