Awakening Bharat Mata by Swapan Dasgupta

The United States is moving in the other direction. Since the electronic voting machines were introduced nationally, the tense wait for an outcome has been reduced to barely three or four hours.” The message I take is that delayed election counts are the hallmark of corrupt and underdeveloped twentieth-century sinkholes, and prompt election counts the mark of civilized modern nations on the rise. It begins: “Till the turn of the century, the counting of votes in an Indian general election was a prolonged three-day affair. A very useful introduction to right-wing Indian thought is the veteran journalist (and now BJP member of parliament) Swapan Dasgupta’s Awakening Bharat Mata. Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the transformation of Indian politics since the 1990s. That wasn’t much of a choice, one of her co-workers said, although you don’t always get good choices in life. Well, you could barricade yourself in a room, one replied, or look for a makeshift weapon.

Someone asked what would happen if you couldn’t. They explained that an active-shooter incident usually lasts three to five minutes, during which time you would probably want to leave the area. The firearms experts who ran the session, she said, were military veterans of some sort - and pretty homespun. These episodes don’t happen often, of course, but they make quite an impression on CEOs when they do - and my neighbor is not the first person I know who’s been to a training session about how to deal with them. Of course, all shooters are “active.” Active shooter is what the TV stations call an armed psychopath during the brief period between the moment he starts gunning people down - say, in a cinema, church, school or office - and the moment he dies in a blaze of police- or self-inflicted gunfire. She had come from a mandatory “active-shooter training session” at her office. On Tuesday a woman who lives on our street was arriving to vote just as I was.

My local polling station is a Christian Brothers high school set amid football fields and parking lots.

Awakening Bharat Mata by Swapan Dasgupta