You’ll be fine without privacy

As a true patriot, you should donate it to the cause of national security

January 20, 2019 12:15 am | Updated 12:15 am IST

The problem with people like Rahul Gandhi is that they keep making completely false allegations against our Prime Minister. For instance, take his pet grouse that the Prime Minister doesn’t listen to the heartbeat of the people. This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in my whole life. Is he the Prime Minister of India or a cardiologist at Apollo, that he should listen to heartbeats all the time?

But every Indian knows that the Prime Minister does listen. If you really believe he is an arrogant man who never listens to anyone, I dare you to say so in a Facebook post, along with your address and phone number. I promise you that in 24 hours we will come to know who is a bad listener and who isn’t. As they say in Hindi, milk will become milk and water will become water.

The Prime Minister is all ears

The biggest proof that listening to people is top priority for our Prime Minister is the recent order by his government authorising 10 central agencies to intercept, monitor, and decrypt “any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer”. I can’t think of a bigger step taken by any Prime Minister anywhere in the world to listen round the clock, everywhere, to every citizen irrespective of caste, class, religion, gender, mother tongue, and whether or not the urea they use comes with neem-coating.

Sadly, pliable journalists and their patrons in the shameless Opposition are opposing this move because they have nothing better to do. They are alleging that it will result in invasion of people’s privacy. What makes their protestations totally unconvincing is that they defended Aadhaar when people said Aadhaar invaded privacy. They said if you have nothing to hide, what’s your problem?

Today I want to tell them the same thing: if you have nothing to hide, what’s your problem? Thanks to Snowden, the whole world knows America snoops on the whole world. You never protested that. But now you accuse your own government of ‘snooping’ when all it wants is to know you better. Tell me: what better way to know someone than to spy on everything that passes through their computers? Why should there be any secrets between you and your dear leader who you so lovingly voted to power almost five years ago? What will you do with all your privacy anyway? Build Taj Mahal? Why not donate it to the cause of national security?

Don’t you know that terrorists save all their evil plans on their personal computers? You must have read in the papers about our brilliant sleuths busting the sleeper cells of the dreaded terrorist group, Harkat-ul-Meerkat-e-Furcoat-ul-Zameen-e-Asmaan-e- Mujahi d e e n-e-Anti-India-e-Lashkar-e-Hizbul-e-lol Qaida. How do you think they did it? It’s not as if the sleeper cells were sleeping after a heavy breakfast of appam and coconut milk, waiting for the police to come and wish them ‘Happy Bombing!’ We caught them because we had been diligently monitoring the laptops and smart phones of every single citizen of India, including those too poor to own a laptop or smart phone.

In other words, the compulsive contrarians who keep harping on privacy are actually doing two things: first, they are refusing to trust their own democratically elected government, which, if you ask me, makes them hardcore anti-nationals fully deserving of every bit of surveillance; second, they are taking the side of the terrorists and bad guys, for those are the only ones who stand to gain by not having their computers spied upon.

The solution to India’s problems

Looked at objectively, it is clear that mass surveillance is a revolutionary step that can change the very character of Indian democracy. I can’t tell you how excited I am by this move. Like every patriotic Indian, I also have great solutions for India’s problems. Now all I need to do to communicate them to the government is to open a word file in my laptop and write them down. And I’m happy to tell you that this was the first thing I did in 2019: I wrote down the solution to India’s problems. Since you can’t do surveillance on me, let me voluntarily share my solution with you: dictatorship.

That’s what Indian democracy needs. All our problems have the same root cause: population. Too many Indians. And too many poor Indians. If India can reduce its population by 50%, then we will have plenty for every one. Plenty of jobs, plenty of food, and, most important, corruption and poverty will both come down by 50%.

And the only way to reduce our population is to let the army run the government and leave policymaking to experts, preferably from World Bank and McKinsey. Anyway, this is what I wrote down in my laptop and I’m confident our government has taken note of it. As for those who insist on asking what about right to privacy, well, if data is the new oil, then as they say in Hindi, privacy has gone to buy oil.

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