Narendra Modi has now delivered his 12th Independence Day address in succession as India's Prime Minister. He is now ahead of Indira Gandhi and next only to Jawaharlal Nehru in terms of the length of his unbroken string of successive ID addresses delivered. In terms of the duration of his speeches he was already way ahead of all his predecessors, and this year he broke his own record by crossing the century mark with an address that took all of 103 minutes. But we should take note of his Independence Day address this year for reasons other than these figures. His silences and utterances both rang loudly and sent out clear messages about the forthcoming priorities of the unfolding fascist agenda of his government and his mother organisation RSS which is now in its centenary year. In fact, Modi made a special mention of the RSS calling it the world's biggest NGO! More about that later.

First about the silences. Independence Day is primarily about India's anti-colonial freedom movement and the vision of a free and modern India that propelled that movement through decades of remarkable social and political churning in what was the world's biggest colony in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While India's former colonial rulers are now in no position to treat India as a vassal state, the US imperialists, especially now under the Trump Presidency, are trying to subject India to a neo-colonial system of dependency. From imposing punitive tariffs on Indian exports and shackling undocumented Indian citizens in the US to dictating the terms of India's international trade and foreign policy, the Trump Administration is humiliating India and undermining our self-respect as a sovereign republic at every step. Modi's twelfth address from the ramparts of the historic Lal Qila remained conspicuously silent about this growing imperialist threat to India's political and economic sovereignty.

For millions of Indians, survival today is a huge challenge. Vanishing jobs, declining income and soaring prices of essential goods and services have been eroding the livelihoods of vast sections of India's working people, worsening their living conditions as the Indian economy took one blow after another, ever since the disastrous demonetisation in November 2016. Instead of acknowledging the severity of economic crisis that has now engulfed the economy across sectors, Modi made the astounding claim of having lifted 250 million Indians out of poverty and into a 'neo middle class'.

Or take the question of governance. Manipur has been burning for months on end, Modi has not bothered to visit the state even once in this period and again remained mum about Manipur in his Independence Day address. As Adivasis across India face brutal eviction and demolition drives in forests and mineral-rich areas, Narendra Modi has the audacity to project Operation Kagar, the extra-judicial extermination campaign in Chhattisgarh, as a tribute to Birsa Munda in the 125th year of his martyrdom! The Adivasi revolts constituted a glorious chapter of our freedom movement which not only freed India from the shackles of colonial slavery but also shook the foundations of landlordism and 'loanlordism' (usury), and today Narendra Modi seeks to tarnish the memory of one of the greatest heroes of India's indigenous people, an ever-inspiring icon of our freedom movement, by offering him the 'tribute' of one of India's most bloody state-led extermination of indigenous people.

Ever since the sudden launch of the so-called Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls in Bihar, which is turning out to be a massive exercise in targeted exclusion, and Rahul Gandhi's August 7 press conference which turned the spotlight on election theft with more than one lakh fake voters added in just one Assembly segment of Bengaluru Central Lok Sabha constituency, the whole country is discussing "vote chori". The Election Commission wants us to accept the purge of 6.5 million voters as a 'purification of electoral rolls, which sounds eerily similar to an electoral version of 'ethnic cleansing', while the whole world can now see how living people have been declared dead and Bihar's own residents who are compelled to migrate to other states in search of livelihood are being dubbed outsiders and removed from the electoral rolls of Bihar. Narendra Modi's Independence Day address predictably said nothing about the SIR drive of mass disenfranchisement.

But what he said towards the end of his 103-minute-long speech put the SIR and other allied measures of the government in its strategic perspective. Modi posited infiltration as a grave challenge facing the country, blaming it as a threat to national security and a deliberate conspiracy to change India's demography. The speech became a venomous harangue against the bogey of infiltrators - blaming them for 'snatching away the livelihoods of our youth', 'targeting our sisters and daughters', 'misleading innocent tribals and seizing their lands' and creating ‘a crisis for national security '. PM Modi then announced a 'High-Powered Demographic Mission' to look into the infiltration crisis and recommend measures to make India 'infiltrator-free'.

This was also the sum and substance of the BJP's election campaign in Jharkhand Assembly elections, and the Bihar SIR drive is also sought to be justified by invoking this bogey of infiltration from Bangladesh and Myanmar. In Assam the whole agenda of NRC has of course been an offshoot of the 'save demography' campaign. It is another matter that the BJP's anti-infiltrator hysteria failed spectacularly in Jharkhand, not a single 'foreign national' has been reported so far in Bihar even as 6.5 million names have been deleted on various pretexts, and in Assam even after six years and two rounds of NRC, the BJP government is still looking for a 'perfect NRC' that suits its anti-infiltrator hysteria.

While whipping up Hindutva hysteria, Modi also gave credit to the organisation that started it all and has been relentlessly pursuing this agenda for one hundred years - the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. But in doing so, bizarrely, he described it as the world's biggest NGO! He should have also added that the biggest 'NGO' is also the world's most shadowy NGO which has never had any registration or audit. Or he could have also called it a non-state actor that now works in tandem with the state with full impunity. Independence Day for the BJP is now primarily an occasion to remember the Partition and further otherise Muslims  as perpetrators of Partition in the past and terrorists or infiltrators in the present. In the name of yet another 'political drama film', the infamous maker of the film "Kashmir Files" has now come up with a sequel "The Bengal Files" to inflame communal passions ahead of the 2026 Assembly elections in West Bengal. A petroleum ministry Independence Day advertisement had Savarkar on top of Gandhi while a proposed NCERT module on Partition blames Mountbatten, Muslim League and the Congress for the bloody bifurcation of the country in the 1940s, obscuring the fact that it was Savarkar who was the first to talk of a Hindu nation.

As we enter the 79th year of India's independence, we must fight back by all means possible against the fascist threat to its basic principle of ‘one person, one vote’ and defeat the so-called ‘High-Powered Demographic Mission’ of establishing a Hindu Rashtra with a people-powered defence of the Constitution, Democracy and Freedom.