Independence, Betrayed.

(Chalo Sansad, July 2026)

NEET-UG 2026 Paper Leak

We curate a museum of broken bodies to feel less hollow.
Khudiram’s teenage neck snapping quietly in the colonial dawn.
Masterda’s teeth shattered by a British hammer, before the rope was even tied.
Bhagat Singh, turning the pages of Lenin in the shadow of his own impending autopsy.
Pritilata, feeling the sharp, immediate burn of cyanide, swallowing death to deny the empire her surrender.
Azad’s final, solitary bullet.
Sarabha’s nineteen-year-old smile.
The violent geometry of Benoy, Badal, and Dinesh bleeding out on the cold marble floors of power.
We bind their corpses in leather.
We place them on library shelves and call it independence.
We light incense, sing the anthem, and pretend the debt is paid.

But the empire never left.
It only changed its wardrobe.
It learned to speak our language,
draping its cruelty in the holy shade of orange.
The men who inherited the throne sit in climate-controlled corridors,
their lapels pinned with saffron,
signing papers with gold-nibbed pens, operating a vast machine of polite, sterilized indifference.
They have commodified the future, printing invisible price tags on leaked exam sheets.
Selling the intellect of a generation to the highest bidder in the dark,
while demanding we bow to their vibrant, painted nationalism.

Look at the street.
Look at the spine of the present tense.
The inheritors of Pritilata’s defiance are not in the history books.
They are twelve years old. They are sixteen.
They are suffocating on chemical smoke at Jantar Mantar.
These children did not stumble into the streets by accident.
They came demanding a revolution.
A total, unsparing collapse of the corruption that dictates every major policy, every stolen future.
They demanded a system where they are measured by the weight of their minds, not the depth of a politician’s pockets.

In return, the state sends the riot police.
Watch the baton swing in slow motion.
It has no memory of the constitution.
It does not remember Tirupur Kumaran’s skull fracturing for holding a piece of cloth.
Today, it meets the fragile architecture of young bones with the exact same sickening crack,
sanctioned by men who have painted the nation orange
so we would not notice the blood on the asphalt.
A student bleeds out merely for demanding a piece of honest paper.

The skin of the oppressor is now our own, but the cage is identical.
A hunger strike wastes away in the open air.
Wangchuk’s hollow stomach is a quiet, absurd theater.
A performance of starvation completely invisible to men who have swallowed the country whole.
The minister of education looks down from his fortress.
He digests his heavy dinner perfectly.
He will not resign. He will not apologize.
He watches the water cannons wash the youth away with the clinical detachment of a colonial viceroy.

Do not lay another marigold at the feet of dead revolutionaries.
Do not dare sing the anthem while the republic uses its constitution as a butcher’s block.
Stop bowing to bronze.
Those statues you worship are nothing but haunted real estate –
hollow metal mocking the fresh, terrified blood on the asphalt.
The freedom they choked on cyanide to buy?
It is being asphyxiated right now, under the heavy, polished boots of your own government.
It is being systematically fractured, bone by young bone,
fed into an administrative meat grinder draped in orange silk.

The machinery of the empire was never dismantled. It was simply inherited.
We are not free people.
We are just well-trained inmates.
So profoundly hollowed out,
so stripped of our spine,
that we now applaud the wardens,
justify the pellet guns,
and fiercely defend the color of our own slaughterhouse walls.

— alittlesparrow —

(22. 07. 2026)