First person: Why I came home from the UK to vote this year
When have distances and time zones, boundaries and borders, come in the way of feeling love, longing and loss?
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On a chilly December morning in 2019, just days before Christmas, a small group of Indian students in Grenoble, France, planned to hold a gathering. This event was intended to show solidarity with the protestors back home in India who had taken to the streets over citizenship concerns following the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act and the subsequent police brutality.
Another group of Indian students warned the organisers that such a gathering would tarnish India’s image abroad and threatened to report them to the police if they didn’t abandon their plans. The irony of threatening police action in a country where protests are jokingly called a national pastime was not lost on anyone involved. Moreover, nobody could quite fathom just how brittle a country’s image needed to be for it to be jettisoned by a mere dozen students meeting in a park.
As planned, they did meet. They spoke dispassionately about resistance, read poems as well as the preamble of the Indian Constitution. In so doing, the students proclaimed their unabashed love for their country.
I was at the gathering that day for the same, simple reason. I love my country. And it is that same love that brings me back to India now –...
