The Bhattacharjee Chronicles – I: How to Take Over a Country and Reformat its Civilisation

The people to whom the Pits transferred the reins of administration were the brown Pits… For 70 years, this new oligarchy ruled Sharat with a mixture of egregiousness, greed and graft that had few equals.

Editor’s Note: A fortnightly summary and analysis of news and events that the mainstream media missed out on. This is the first instalment of the Chronicles. The author will do his best to keep the readers of this portal informed of all major developments every fortnight. Stay glued to your computer screen. This is a piece of satire.

The command and control centre of the holy alliance movement was in a state of happy delirium. The top leaders of the triumvirate were chuffed to bits, and understandably so, after pulling off one of the most audacious coups in modern political history. If that sounds like a bit of a hyperbole, call it “electoral history”, hustings or whatever. 

Admittedly, the remarkable coup d’etat of the Pottycan – Usalman alliance was initially confined to the strategically important and most affluent province of Lotusland, the venerable and ancient country that was called Aryasthan in the indigenous language (Prachinbhasha, also called Samskritam) that dated back to about five thousand years ago. The current name of Lotusland in the Samskritam language is Sharatdesh or Sharat (officially, the Republic of Indusind in English, or Indusind) and the province where the alliance had won such an important battle was Bararajya. Its capital is Nambay, in the language of the old European colonials who first built this magnificent city. In the subsequent discussion, Sharat / Sharatdesh / Lotusland will be used interchangeably.

The importance of Nambay in particular and Bararajya in general for Indusind is humongous. It is of an order of magnitude that cannot be spelled out in common discourse but is well known to all political scientists, economists and strategic analysts throughout the world. For thousands of years, the entire Western world had coveted the riches and the location of Lotusland. The latter’s contribution to human patrimony was unequalled and the nearest challenger was ancient Hellas, which itself became a victim of the savage onslaughts of the western wing of the Usulman hordes. The only other contender that could be considered to be in the same league (more or less) as Aryasthan was the Middle Kingdom in North-east Asia, peopled by the Chindits.

The irony in all this is that Aryasthan’s culture, philosophy and religion had spread all over Asia through peaceful methods. The influence of Aryasthan was implanted in the other regions of Asia culturally, not through the sword or the gun. While all this was going on, the people of Aryasthan and its social fabric became increasingly vulnerable to foreign military aggression. The overall ambience of peace, tolerance and acceptance could not quite confront armed aggression. There was also an excess of individualism and pacifism among the Kamals, as the residents of Lotusland are referred to in common parlance. As a result of this, they could easily be divided by foreign invaders. Set against each other, the Kamals soon lost out to the marauding Usalman hordes from the west and the north-west of Aryasthan. Admittedly, the military valour of the Kamals was unquestioned and evoked the grudging admiration of the conquerors themselves. But treachery and the enemy within are impossible to overcome.

Over the centuries, the invaders from the West ruthlessly and mercilessly destroyed countless structures and habitations of the Kamals, with particular emphasis on their places of worship. The wounded civilisation of the vanquished Sharat displayed remarkable resilience in the face of this savagery and scholars throughout the world have recorded (with admiration and awe) the titanic struggle of the Kamals to preserve their ancient culture, religion and civilisation.

The Usulman rulers, as their creed dictated, tried their best to weed away the Kamals from their old faith,. including brutal pressure. But the conversion attempts were barely successful. Sadly, some of the poorer and more disadvantaged segments among the Kamals could not resist the virulent oppression and converted to the invader’s faith. Thus, the ancient land slowly saw the fissures of religion develop over time. A religious fault-line was added to the other socio-political divisions in Lotusland. The population was now divided as the Kamals and the converted Kamals who were categorised as Usulmans for administrative and legal purposes.

The white invaders from Europe, the Pits from Pittain, who displaced the Usulman rulers in Lotusland about two hundred and sixty years ago, had the same game-plan for Lotusland as the latter. The riches and wealth of Lotusland were the primary attraction – the location of the new territory was another. Any power that controlled this country, which was rightly a sub-continent, also controlled the sea route from Europe to the East. The Pits did not have any religious agenda like the Usulmans – for them, it was the moolah that mattered.

However, the Pits were on the same page as the Usalmans as far as the ancient culture and civilisation of Aryasthan were concerned. There was more than an element of primeval jealousy involved here. Yes, the Pits wanted the magnificent heritage of their conquered possession wiped out. But, they also wanted to create a whole new class of Kamals and transplant it in the empire. This was the well-accepted process of deracination of the conquered population – create a breed of brown sahebs who would ape the mores and values of the white man more assiduously than the role model himself. These quislings would be more at home in Hindon, the capital of Pittain, than in the sweltering ambience of Lotusland, and guard the interests of Pax Pittanica as assiduously as the original lot.

Thus, the second decade of the twenty-first century continued to see the intellectual domination of the brown-Pits and also the Kamal-Usulmans, who, of course, predated the former. Briefly, the Kamal-Usulmans were the collaborators of the Usulman rulers in northern Lotusland. They comprised the courtiers and junior functionaries in the Usulman court and in the hinterland. They spoke Ardoo, a bastardised version of the original language of the West Asian invaders, which the latter also spoke and understood. Although the Pits ruled over the Kamals as well as the minority Usulmans, they clearly favoured the latter. This was to keep a check on the majority Kamals.

Slowly, from the turn of the nineteenth century, the Kamals had been asserting themselves and occasionally, the Usulmans also half-heartedly joined the former in confronting the white masters. The denouement occurred at the end of the fourth decade of the twentieth century when the entire world order changed. The continent to which the Pits belonged got engulfed in a brutal conflict, which gradually engulfed all parts of the globe. This, of course, was the Second World War (WW2). Lotusland contributed enormously to the war effort of the Pits both in terms of manpower and in terms of resources and finance. 

While the global conflict raged in Europe, North Africa, East and South-east Asia, as well as in the Pacific, the freedom movement in Lotusland acquired critical momentum. Pax Pittanica had barely survived the conflict and was in no position to control Sharat. The Pits departed post-haste but not before dividing the beautiful country along religious lines. An artificial construct was created to the west of Sharat, where the minority Usulmans were supposed to go. Many went but a fairly large number chose to stay on in the old country.

The people to whom the Pits transferred the reins of administration were the brown Pits, as mentioned earlier. For 70 years (except minor interludes), this new oligarchy ruled Sharat with a mixture of egregiousness, greed and graft that had few equals. There was always the façade of democracy but the system was basically a Tammany Hall regime. Sharat’s constitutional structure provided for a Federal or Central Government and State Governments in various parts of the country. Unlike many countries in the Western hemisphere, the Central Government has most of the powers while the States have residual authority. This does not mean that some States do not have quite a clout, as this report will bring out.

The ruling party from 1947, when the Pits departed from Sharat’s shores, till 2014 was basically the Digress Party, to whom the departing white colonials had bequeathed power. The kingpins, with apologies to the feminists, were the Mehroo family, starting with Grandpa J.L. Mehroo, the original brown Pit, followed by his daughter India, and later on by his grandson Rajesh. We have to fast forward to 2014 when the country firmly rejected the Mehroos and their family coterie. The long-dormant Indusind electorate, that had been neutered for nearly seven decades by the Mehroo family and the Digress Party, finally woke up from its semi-perennial slumber and voted in the Sharatiya Janata Party (SJP); its charismatic leader Barendra Rodi (BR / BaRo) and his loyal number two, Pramit Wash (PW / a.k.a. Mota Seth).

During its first mandate, the SJP made a valiant effort to roll back the shabby residues of the Digress Party’s long years of relentless loot and brigandage. The efforts of the new occupants of Pristina Peak, the focal centre of the Central Government’s seat of power in Sharat’s capital, New Telhi, didn’t quite succeed. This was because the departing Digress clique had left behind a rear-guard army of saboteurs and guerrillas. These were from the entrenched bureaucracy, which had always been in cahoots with the rulers. Others in the unholy nexus included tainted business barons, the so-called intellectuals with their roots in the western hemisphere and the clergy that led the Usulman community.

When it came to the renewal of the national mandate in mid-2019, the SJP under BaRo and PW swept back to power with an increased majority, even in those parts of the country that were ruled by parties close to the Digress and its cohorts. In the state of Bararajya, the SJP, with its the-then allies, the Shibboleth Sentinels (SS) won the vast majority of seats that were up for grabs.

The fireworks started a few months after the Federal elections in mid-2019 when the State elections for Bararajya’s local Assembly took place recently. The SJP and the SS fought as allies on a common platform and won a comfortable majority in the state Assembly. The SJP won around two-thirds of the seats and the SS the remaining one-third. However, the Digress Party soon showed that its basic animal instincts of predatory survival were very much intact. In fact, under the white empress of the party, it was on the recovery path. Empress Ponya had roots that could be traced back to the European region of Picily, which taught the world the finer principles of extortion, brigandage and mass murder.

She and her team soon managed to break up the electoral alliance of the SJP and the SS, and a coalition government led by the Digress assumed power in Bararajya. The capital of the state, Nambay, is also the commercial and financial epicentre of Lotusland. Therefore, it was the appropriate springboard for the eventual takeover of the entire country. Ponya (a.k.a Pantonia) Naino and her son, Praoul, who was also referred to rather unkindly by the desi press as “always on the prowl” (AOTP), started their dialogue with the Usulmans to help them take on the SJP government at the Central / national level.

Soon, the dialogue bore fruit. The national government under BaRo and PW had enacted an important legislation to expedite the citizenship process of Kamals and members of allied faiths who had been compelled to leave the neighbouring three Usalman countries that surround Lotusland. Usulmans, naturally and logically, had not been covered by this legislation, since there is no question of these people being victims of religious victimisation in fellow-Usulman countries. For the holy alliance, this was a heaven-sent opportunity to engineer social strife and a semi civil war environment.

For the Usulmans, easily prone to violence and intolerance, the message from Ponya’s party and its allies like Harad Tower, the fish baron of Bararajya, and indeed Sharat, if not the entire globe, was sweet music. The clergy from the minarets also sang the same song. The Usulmans of the national capital and its surrounding areas hit the streets with the same intensity as the SS and the Nazi party cadres had done in Germany during the heady days of the Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938. Ponya’s chorus was soon joined by the political leadership of Porkistan (Pitsland), the breakaway region of Sharatdesh.

As New Telhi / Telhi, the capital of Lotusland, burnt and reeled under the onslaughts of the street gangs, the Digress Party’s High Command celebrated by swigging their Chianti and Frascati, although the party’s hoi polloi could hardly distinguish one from the other. For this entire lot, the cherry on the cake, in all this, was that the Indusind Republic had a state guest visiting the capital during the mayhem. And he was no less than Donald Duck Frump, the President of Umreeka.

Inshallah and hallelujah, life could hardly be better.

(NOTE: It may not be possible to correlate the scenario described above with any real-life situations)

Featured Image: The Economic Times

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