As Umberto Eco said in his essay Ur-Fascism in 1995: ‘We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes . . . Freedom and liberation are an unending task.’ Authoritarianism is not the monopoly of one party. Power corrodes and corrupts. And tyranny returns in other forms. To stare back at power, to stand firm against onslaughts, to sway and bend if necessary but not to break and succumb, and to challenge falsehoods, is not easy. But Indians have done it in the past – before Independence, by marching with
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