Tavleen Singh writes: Who are the real patriots?

He seems quite proud of this new label, without noticing that the people he is charging with sedition could be the very patriots that we need today.

6 min readSep 13, 2026 06:45 AM IST First published on: Sep 13, 2026 at 06:45 AM IST

There appears to be a fifth columnist in the Prime Minister’s inner circle. This thought came to me when I saw him jubilantly striding across that college stage in Vadodara last week. The event seemed part of his Gen-Z seduction crusade, and what he strode, smiled and waved to was the tune of We Will Rock You. Luckily, it was only the tune that played. Had he been aware of the words, Modi may have fainted. Here is a line: ‘You got mud on your face, big disgrace. Somebody better put you back into your place.’

See what I mean about a fifth columnist working in the innards of the PMO? Also, the song is from 1977 when people of my generation were young and rebellious, and the cockroaches who have now got so badly under Modi’s skin were not even specks on the horizon. More seriously — who was the idiot who advised the Prime Minister to attend this joyous event at a time when a PG (paying guest) hostel had just crumbled in Delhi University’s south campus, killing young students and their dreams? Among the dead was eighteen-year-old Arpit Jaj, whose taxi driver father worked overtime to send his son to college and struggled to pay the exorbitant rent for his PG hovel. I heard Arpit’s story in Barkha Dutt’s Mojo Story. It brought tears to my eyes.

We in the mainstream media have mostly ignored the stories of the seven dead students. Perhaps because they would all be as heartbreaking. Instead, almost every news channel reported every moment of the Prime Minister’s trip to Gujarat as if it was the most important news of the day. If they had stayed with the building collapse in Satya Niketan, there may have been some hope of coercing the ‘triple-engine’ government in Delhi to stem the corruption that led to the horror of students being killed for just trying to get a college degree.

While the Chief Minister’s cohort surveyed the debris of the illegally built PG (paying guest) hostel from high above, a handful of real journalists dug deeper into the crashed building and showed pictures of the horrendous conditions in which students live. The Cockroach Janta Party leader who said that students are being forced to live like cockroaches is correct. The building that crumbled is among others in which students live in cells built one upon the other, and that can only be reached through dangerously narrow alleys darkened by clumps of hanging wires. I must here add that the best reporting I saw came from a digital platform called PEEK TV.

When I saw their pictures of those dismal alleyways and dreary rooms, I found myself hoping that the Prime Minister was also watching so he could understand why he needs to forget about our ‘demographic dividend’. Young students who are forced to live and study in such horrible conditions will never learn to think, dream or learn. How will they be able to compete with students who, in other colleges in other countries, have already learned how to deal with the technological revolution that AI brings?

This one building collapse has brought to the surface many other things, like the abysmal state of governance in Delhi. It has revealed corruption so evil that it boggles the mind. Everyone is involved in creating the smokescreen that allows builders to disobey the rules of safe planning. The PG mafia that extorts inexplicably high rents from desperate students is controlled by politicians and high officials who always seem to get away with their evil deeds.

The only thing that happens after every disaster of the kind we saw in Satya Niketan is that some lowly officials get publicly yelled at by higher officials like the Chief Minister and then some committee is appointed to (supposedly) go into causes and solutions. These committees never amount to much, as we can see from the one appointed after the building collapse in Delhi’s Malviya Nagar some months ago. Corrupt officials and politicians collude to make Delhi non-functional except when there is a big conference of the BRICS kind. And then things only appear to work because visiting dignitaries are only allowed to see restricted sections of India’s capital city.

This is the way things are. It is the way things have always been. But the cockroaches and their young cheerleaders are ensuring this is not how they will always be in the future. It is the one thing that gives me some hope that a day will come when officials and politicians who have created the mess that we see today pay for their crimes. One idea from me is that the officials who allowed that PG hostel to be built should be charged with manslaughter, and that this be done every time a building collapses and kills people.

No more committees. No more inquiry commissions. When people die because of the criminal negligence of officials, those officials should be charged with manslaughter, if not murder. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister needs to find out who the fifth columnist is in his inner circle and punish him for sending him off to college events where he blames what is wrong with India on ‘dimagi naxals’. He seems quite proud of this new label, without noticing that the people he is charging with sedition could be the very patriots that we need today.