The House of Echoes: Where Silence Becomes Law

The 1975 Chronicle.

In August 15, 1947, the father woke us to the tryst with destiny. On June 25, 1975, the daughter tucked us into bed with the declaration of Emergency. One was a midnight of promise, the other a midnight of pause. And somewhere between those two hours, we learned that freedom is not inherited—it must be rehearsed, remembered, and reclaimed.

The Emergency was not just a political event. It was a lullaby of control, sung in the key of fear. Newspapers went blank, poets went underground, and the Constitution was folded into a neat little square and tucked into a drawer marked “Later.” But the voices—they didn’t die. They were archived in silence, encrypted in lullabies, and whispered through the cracks of prison walls. Dissent didn’t disappear. It simply changed its costume.

Fast forward to now, and the silencing has evolved. We no longer need jails. We have hashtags. We don’t need bans. We have bandwidth. The new weapon is not censorship—it’s saturation. The louder the anthem, the harder it is to hear the question. The more the slogans, the less the space for thought. Dissent is no longer debated—it is diagnosed. If you think differently, you are not disagreeing. You are diseased.

Take Shaheen Bagh. A protest that began with blankets and preambles, with grandmothers and students, was quickly drowned in a flood of louder narratives. They were called anti-national, foreign-funded, disruptive. The protest didn’t end with violence. It ended with volume. The same with the farmers. A million voices in the cold, asking for fairness, were met with barricades and a louder voice saying, “They are misled. They are dangerous. They are enemies of growth.” The protests were not crushed. They were muffled.

And now, we have Clause 247 of the 2025 Income Tax Bill. A clause so elegant in its wording, so surgical in its reach, that it doesn’t need to silence you. It simply needs to suspect you. If a tax officer believes you might be hiding something—an asset, a transaction, or worse, a thought—they can override your passwords, enter your emails, your social media, your cloud, your digital soul. No warrant. No warning. Just a hunch. Your dissent is now a taxable event. Your opinion is a liability. Your privacy is a myth.

They say it’s for your safety. That it’s to catch the tax evaders, the black money hoarders, the digital smugglers. But what it really does is create a climate where thinking becomes risky. Where speaking becomes taxable. Where silence becomes the safest investment.

We are told that silence is peace. That silence is maturity. That silence is patriotism. But silence is also erasure. Silence is the space where histories are rewritten, where voices vanish, where tribes disappear. We are building a nation not of voices, but of echoes. Every whisper archived. Every murmur monitored. Every dissenting thought—tagged, tracked, and taxed.

And yet, the echoes remain. In the grandmother who told you stories in code. In the poet who published in footnotes. In the architect who curved a wall just enough to say, “I see differently.” These are the architects of dissent. And we? We are their descendants.

So let us remember: the Emergency was not an exception. It was a rehearsal. And today, the performance continues—just with better lighting and a stronger Wi-Fi signal. But every time we whisper, every time we remember, every time we refuse to forget—we add to the rebellion.

We are building a house of echoes. And in that house, every whisper is a window. Every silence is a scream. Every thought is a threat. And every threat is a promise.