It is a grievous yoke, this burden of borrowed blame—
a collar fastened not by hand but by suspicion’s iron whim.
Each time some wayward soul, bearing a surname that resonates mine,
trips the wires of wrong,
the whole damn nation tilts its gaze—
not toward justice, but toward us.
Us.
The dusky-skinned, the mosque-born,
the ones with crescent moons in names,
whose mothers prayed in tongues too foreign for prime-time comfort.
Suddenly, we are all summoned.
Summoned to the dock of national conscience
to account for sins we neither conjured nor condoned.
They demand an arena of shame—
lip-wrung condemnations,
flag-wrapped fealties,
a parade of disavowals
that must be louder, sharper, more breathless than before.
As though the volume of our denials might absolve us
of crimes not ours.
And I must speak, not softly but starkly:
I am no confessor for a stranger’s sins.
No tribunal sits above my brow.
I owe no one the hippodrome of guilt.
The sun rises without my bidding,
and so too do the madmen fall—without my nod.
I am Indian. Not as an addendum.
Not pencilled in the margin of someone else’s belonging.
But wholly, fiercely, undeniably so.
My veins carry the dust of Bhagat Singh,
the perspiration of Ambedkar,
the silence of every unmarked grave
that nationalism buried and forgot.
Do not ask me to audition
for a passport already inked in sacrifice.
Do not hand me the script of the apologetic native,
for I shall not read it.
Let this be clear as broken glass:
A man’s faith does not annul his rights.
A man’s skin does not tether him to another’s shadow.
Identity is not inherited crime.
It is forged—in thought, in constancy, in scars.
Let us speak, then, of unrest—
of the state that forgets its promise,
that stirs the pot of division
and calls it patriotism.
Of ministers with tongues forked
like colonial serpents,
charming the poor with gods and guns
while coffers burst unseen.
Let us not forget the riots fed on rumour,
the lynchings filmed for Facebook fame,
the laws tilted like bent scales
toward temples and terror.
In such an amphitheatre of control,
what madness to demand that we perform purity?
Enough.
Enough of this Pavlovian shame,
of being summoned to cry on cue,
to swear loyalty not to a land—
but to the lie that we do not already belong.
Do you not see?
The question is not whether we are Indian enough,
but whether this India remembers what that means.
So hear me now—
I am Indian in every breath I take,
every grave I’ll return to,
every injustice I’ll fight till my bones are ash.
I will not lower my voice
so others may raise their fears.
I will not apologise for my name,
nor for the noise it makes in narrow throats.
This land is mine—
not because I say so,
but because it is written in the soil,
in sweat, in struggle,
in the quiet, unmoving certainty
of those who stayed
even when the nation turned its back.
This is the beginning.
And that—regardless of your stare—
is also the end.
