Bob Dylan is once again humming 'the answer my friend is blowing in the wind...' This time the answer is not as elusive and metaphorical as the original song is about. At one place he asks 'how many deaths would it take to realize that too many people have died...'

I sat down with Mr. Dylan and told him the story of the Electoral bonds. He quipped 'how many thousand bonds would take to realize that you have killed your democracy with a thousand cuts.' I knew it was profound as he always is, and need I remind he was honoured with a Nobel in literature. Still, I wondered what the innocuous looking Electoral bonds could have done to our political system. Ahem!!

These Bonds bonded with Party calling the shots, running the nation as its fiefdom, capturing and colluding with Institutions designated with mandates to serve the nation with one singular political objective; make India look like the world's largest democracy but run it like a syndicate. There is more to come to the Electoral bonds when the unique alphanumeric identity will be blowing in the wind. And when that happens, I see a political storm building up which will shake the pompous presumption of the Party with a difference, the BJP. Its whirlwind rallies and hopping helicopters will find it difficult to answer the question which will be blowing in the political storm: tell the nation the stories of quid pro quo, the narrative of extortion with the use of central agencies.

This time rabble will be asking these questions. The same rabble which has been raised and used to tear the social fabric of our nation to its political end, create social divisions and get a mandate of hate and paranoia and push the majoritarian political State to its logical conclusion. Probity and politics have taken a divorce. They don't even have a polite conversation. But who would have imagined that when a Money Bill was surreptitiously introduced in 2017 by the BJP to arrange a grand marriage of probity and politics by purportedly bringing transparency in political funding by way legislating on Electoral bonds, and to tie the "holy knot," amending 5 Central Acts; the plot of the biggest financial scam to perpetrate political corruption of the ruling establishment at a scale unprecedented in the history of our Republic.

The Corporates were not just sipping tea with the ruling Party after emptying their coffers for them. They were tweaking policies, bagging contracts, getting mines, ports, airports. The PSUs were served at the negotiating table.

Bob Dylan rose to get up and deftly asked" how many years can some people exist before they are allowed to be free??" My countrymen, my free countrymen, freed at the stroke of midnight on 15th August 1947; are you willing to lose your precious freedom to this political establishment or throw it in the dustbin with your vote to cut the roots of the ascendant neo East India Company run by the BJP & the Corporates which is growing like a poisonous weed in our garden of democracy?

The writer, a retired bureaucrat, is State Spokesperson of Jharkhand Congress. Views are personal.