Late on Friday night, July 31, the Prime Minister chose to be merciful, or to perform mercy, which is not the same thing. In an Instagram video, Narendra Modi said he and even his late mother had been abused at Jantar Mantar during the protests over NEET irregularities. He called those responsible “mischievous children” and said dragging them through courts would solve nothing and that it was time to embrace the young. “I want to forgive them,” he said, and asked the country to forgive them too.
The strongman’s video would be moving, were it not for one detail the nearly three-minute video carefully leaves out. The man asking the nation to forgive is the one man in the country with the power to actually do it. But he has not.
“Forgiveness,” from a leader who commands the entire apparatus of the state, can take a concrete form that everyone can see: the first information report (FIR) withdrawn, the sections dropped, the police called off. None of that has happened.
And even as the Prime Minister spoke of embracing the young, a video circulated of a girl, whose authenticity Siasat.com could not independently verify, who said in it that she is only 15 years old, folding her hands and begging the country’s pardon, saying she is so ashamed she cannot look at herself. An FIR was registered against her in Noida after she allegedly raised objectionable slogans targeting Narendra Modi during the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)-led protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar.
That is what “forgiveness” looks like on the ground. Not a case closed, but a child driven by fear, if nothing else, to beg the country’s pardon. You cannot forgive someone you are still prosecuting. To do both at once is not mercy. It is a demonstration of toxic power that says I can crush you and I can spare you, and I want you to watch me do both.
An insult to the PM is not a crime
The complaint against the girl did not even come from someone she had wronged. It came from an advocate in Ghaziabad, in the garb of three sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS): intentional insult to provoke a breach of peace, statements conducing to public mischief and defamation. Strip away the legal jargon and the charge is simple. She was rude about a politician.
Note also what the law itself says about one of those sections. Criminal defamation is a complaint-driven offence, meant to be pursued by the person actually defamed before a magistrate, not registered by police at the instance of an uninvolved third party. The most powerful man in the country did not complain. Someone volunteered to be offended on his behalf, and the police obliged.
The Supreme Court has already said as much. In March 2025, quashing a Gujarat FIR against MP Imran Pratapgarhi over a poem, the court held that police must actually read or hear the words in question before registering a case, called the mechanical registration of speech FIRs an abuse of the process of law and reminded the state that even views a large number of people dislike must be respected and protected. The FIR against the Noida girl fails that test on its face
But here is the uncomfortable truth. Abusing the Prime Minister is not a crime. It is not sedition, nor a threat to the constitutional order, nor the job of a police station to guard the feelings of the most powerful man in the country. A nation that books its citizens for disrespecting their rulers is not a confident nation. It is a nervous one, and a nervous nation wants its people nervous too. The dignity of a high office is not injured when a citizen insults its holder. It is injured when that office turns its police into an instrument of revenge and then calls the retreat “forgiveness.”
When the House ‘forgives’ its residents
Now set all of this against what goes on inside Parliament itself, where the men and women who write our laws sit.
The most infamous example cannot be forgotten. During a Lok Sabha debate in 2023, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Ramesh Bidhuri unleashed a barrage of communal slurs at then-Bahujan Samaj Party’s (BSP) Kunwar Danish Ali, a Muslim MP, telling the House to “throw this mullah out” and calling him a terrorist. In his letter to the Speaker, Danish Ali listed the abuses: bhadwa, katwa, mullah ugravadi, atankvadi. This was said on the floor of the House, on camera and into the record, with fellow BJP MPs seen laughing as it happened.
What did the guardianship of parliamentary dignity produce? The words were expunged and Speaker Om Birla warned Bidhuri of “strict action” only if such behaviour were repeated. A warning for calling an elected representative a circumcised terrorist inside the temple of our democracy.
No FIR. No complainant to defend the injured dignity of the House. Instead, two BJP MPs wrote to the Speaker demanding a probe into Danish Ali’s own conduct. The man abused was asked to explain what he had done to provoke his abuser. No one asked Bidhuri to fold his hands before the nation.
In fact, within days of the slurs, the party made Bidhuri its election in-charge of Rajasthan’s Tonk district. The Privileges Committee moved towards closing the matter once he “expressed regret” before it. And in January 2025, the BJP handed him the ticket from Kalkaji in the Delhi Assembly elections, where he promised to make the constituency’s roads like Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s “cheeks” and mocked Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Atishi for having “changed her father.”
He was not punished for abuse. He was promoted on its strength
One law is a hammer, the other a feather
Hold the two worlds together and the contrast becomes more stark. A citizen’s harsh words become a criminal case and a child’s tearful apology. A lawmaker’s Islamophobic filth against a Muslim colleague becomes an expunged line and a shrug. In one direction the law is a hammer. In the other it is nothing more than a feather.
The law is not blind. It knows whose dignity it must protect and whose it can safely ignore. The message travels downward and it tells you to know your place before you open your mouth.
The party in power built its brand on “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikaas.” But there is no “saath” in a Parliament where a Muslim MP can be called a terrorist to his face and the abuser walks away with a caution, while a girl is hunted across state lines for a slogan. And there is no forgiveness in a leader who pardons on camera while his police keep the file open register fresh FIRs against social media handles for posts about him.
So let the state choose and openly. If insulting the powerful is now a crime, apply it to the powerful too. Book the MP who called a colleague “katwa” and “mullah aatankwadi” on the floor of the House. Or, more honestly, withdraw the case, put away the penal sections and let people speak. Real forgiveness would begin there, not a video shot for the feed.
The measure of a democracy is not how carefully it protects the mighty, but how fiercely it protects the rest of us. On both counts, we are failing.
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