The trail of incidents that are usually termed horrible on other days but have come to be accepted, tolerated, forgiven and forgotten in the name of the Holi tradition every year.

“A 25-year-old Hindu man was allegedly strangled to death in Rajasthan’s Dausa district for trying to stop three men from applying colour on him during Holi celebration”. Every year on Holi, we hear news reports of molestation and non-consensual touches. Year after year these stories have become so widespread and familiar that now we have got subconsciously wired to simply ignore them and move on with our lives. “Holi hai!” (It’s Holi!) is a cry that is shouted, and like clockwork, anyone would come, apply colour to you and proceed further to the next person. Implicit in that cry is, all is well, or all goes on Holi. But in recent years, incidents of communal nature have added themselves to the long list of Holi complaints. Protecting law and order is the job of the police. A murder by a murderer can be stopped in two ways: either you control the situation such that the murderer does not get the opportunity to commit the crime, or you do the murder yourself, leaving the murderer no chance in hell to commit the crime himself. In the first act, the police protect the victim from being murdered and in the second, they protect the murderer. This is not to suggest that police forces are superhumans who can foresee all crimes and prevent them from happening. That is understandable. And precisely why, police are generally not blamed for the crime being committed. They are blamed for what they do once the crime has been committed. And what they do after the crime sets the stage for the next crime. Their actions gesture as to whether such crimes are allowed or not. 

I'm completely in with Modi's plan of largely discounting 30 deaths in Kumbh or 1000 plus deaths under railway 'accidents' in his tenure. Modi knows all too well, more than any of us could ever grasp it, that the population of India is its largest problem. And it needs to be controlled. And since people are not taking care of it by themselves, he has taken it upon himself to prevent it by any and all means. Modi is a pakka Gujarati who knows his economics rather too well. He understands how to maximize capital. Mr Modi comprehends unlike too many of us that marriage and taking care of a wife is not just mentally exhausting but makes little sense economically as well; wife and kids are accountabilities that end up creating large holes in one's pockets. That is why he stranded his wife before it made him a pauper.