Tavleen Singh writes: Not a very happy Diwali

Believe me when I tell you that in this season of fun and festivity I would have liked to write a cheerful piece. Alas, the only good news that came last week was from the United States, where Donald Trump got a well-deserved hammering in the midterm elections. The possibility that we are beginning to see the end of Trumpism brings hope and joy that has spread rapidly across the world because the trouble he caused in trying to 'make America great again' has consequences well beyond American shores.

On the domestic front, much as I have searched for cheery things to write about in this season of fun and feasting, I have failed. In Delhi, the air is so poisonous that I have been unable to step outside without my eyes watering and my throat burning. What is worse is that I had some business to attend to in the old part of this city and was confronted with the horrors caused by unplanned urbanisation. In my childhood, Chandni Chowk was a magical place of old-fashioned shops selling attar and wedding finery. At street corner restaurants, while our mother shopped, my sister and I would stuff ourselves with masses of the most delicious samosas and jalebis. Today only intrepid foreign tourists venture into the old city. It is smelly, dank and dirty, and has hanging over it huge clumps of wires that blot out the sky.

What was more depressing than the polluted air and this visit to Old Delhi was the political news. Rahul Gandhi's rally in Ramlila Maidan appears to have terrified the Bharatiya Janata Party. So, it unleashed its spokesmen onto every willing news channel to shriek aggressively that the rally was a 'flop'. They said this more stridently than usual, and they are usually strident anyway. To ensure that any message the Congress party was trying to send was dead before it reached ordinary voters, senior ministers were deployed to march around the streets of cities as distant as Hyderabad to 'save democracy and stop anarchy'.

When this seemed to have limited impact, out came that tired, old charge of the 'foreign hand'. When Rahul Gandhi was accused of being propped up by evil foreigners, he threw the charge back at the Prime Minister and challenged him to a debate on the subject at a place of his choosing with a judge of his choice. This made ministers fly into action mode and remind him that such a place already existed and it was called Parliament.

Then the story got darker. Much darker. Leaders of the Cockroach Janta Party were charged with being anarchists with mysterious links to 'handlers' in Pakistan and the United States. These charges have been made ever since the cockroaches started making their presence felt on the national stage, but they have now become more serious because they were made by a senior cabinet minister. The very same Jitendra Singh who, after Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, invited these very same cockroach leaders for some chai and chatting. If he knew they were foreign agents, why did he get so cozy with them?

The more important question is why foreign agents have been able to infiltrate the high walls of national security with such impunity? What has our tough-talking Home Minister been doing while this was happening? And why is he not dealing with these vital matters today instead of tramping around the streets of Hyderabad to 'protect democracy and condemn anarchy'? Surely, this menial task can be done by lesser people in the mighty BJP.

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If foreign agents are indeed creating anarchy and chaos in India, it is time that the government made proof of this, public. There has been more than enough time for them to do this since the first charges about foreign funding and 'toolkits' were made after the farmers' agitation all those years ago. We have a Prime Minister who reminds us almost daily that he has done more to strengthen our national security than any who came before him, so how have these foreign agents managed to break through?

As someone who began writing about politics when Indira Gandhi was prime minister, I remember well the number of times she spotted foreign agents under our beds. She raved on about the 'foreign hand' so often that it became a joke among foreign correspondents who came up with some catchy poems about this foreign hand. It was mostly American journalists who were the target because Mrs Gandhi believed that the CIA thought of her as an enemy. Then, as I have said before in this column, a KGB spymaster called Vasili Mitrokhin came out with his memoirs in the nineties in which he said clearly that half of Mrs Gandhi's cabinet ministers were being paid by the Soviet Union.

Today the Russians are on our side, and Donald Trump has ditched his old pal Narendra Modi to cozy up to his 'favourite Field Marshal' in the Islamist Republic next door, so who exactly is the 'foreign hand' now? If the government has details of foreigners financing the cockroaches, details need to be made public soonest because the CJP has huge support among young Indians in the Gen-Z category. These are young people who are dealing with corrupt examinations and soul-destroying unemployment. It might be wiser for the government to address these real problems instead of making reckless charges.