From 1984 to 2025: Epstein Files, COVID, and the Erosion of Indian Democracy

James Bonds don’t come to the rescue of poor Indians. Instead, people like Jeffrey Edward Epstein of the US seem to have become James Bonds working for some military-industrial queen of Israel. The crown of that queen seems to be made of missiles, rocket systems, and other dangerous hacking software to be used against common people by their respective powerful rulers, who can buy such costly things with public funds. It is alleged that even the Indian government has bought and used it (possibly at the cost of millions of children who die because of a lack of safe health care).

At last, what George Orwell imagined in his novel 1984 has come true for India in 2025: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” But, unfortunately for the “queen of weapons,” viruses came in between and exposed it all. It came as the COVID-19 pandemic, and then Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden mainly because of mismanagement of the pandemic in the US (the slogan ‘ab ki baar trump sarkar’ didn’t work in the US in 2020). Then, the Epstein files slowly gained traction because of that Trumpless gap of four years in which Joe Biden was the head of the Democratic Party government. Now, it has come to a stage where it had to be declassified by the Department of Justice, making “ignorance is strength” not possible, even while Donald Trump’s Republican administration is in charge, as if the virus has trumped him again.

Now, it seems from the released files that the “James Bond” called Jeffrey Epstein had trafficked children for sex on his island near the US coast and then blackmailed prominent people into committing various things, finally resulting in profits for his till-now-unknown “weapons queen.” Money had probably also come from India for the purchase of rocket defense systems bought from Israel, and meetings seem to have happened between some prominent Indians (businessmen and politicians included) and Epstein or Epstein’s representatives. Epstein seems to have taken some prominent Indian people “on board.”

Epstein also seems to have funded an organization headed by Terje Rød-Larsen (who was one of the persons involved in back-channel negotiations for the Oslo Accord between Israel and Palestine) just to discredit him. This is similar to how some people tried to discredit Zubeen Da by giving him a stage and then asking him not to sing in languages other than Assamese, which he rightfully resisted by exiting the stage, just like Larsen did by resigning in 2020 from the organization (the International Peace Institute, which was under UN guidance) which later absolved him of any wrongdoing after a probe.

But that level of integrity is not to be expected from crony capitalists and their political stooges in India. The pandemic virus in fact exposed much more than the Epstein files in India, but as the population at large and the media which serves it are uneducated and unscientific, the pandemic actually increased the power and money both for the crony capitalists and also their political stooges. The pandemic made the big businesses and politicians who are funded by them more powerful in India, unlike in the US, mainly because of the US’s educated population and greater independence of media.

Maybe Trump is envious of Indian politicians in that sense, and hence wants to threaten or destabilize their consolidated positions of power. Hence, all this “tariff war” drama between him and other countries, resulting in his arm-twisting to dictate where to buy oil from, and sudden swing positions towards opposite poles in his statements, which also makes one conclude that one single failed James Bond has got the whole US political system swinging between poles.

But this ham-handed James Bond seems to have underestimated the power of a small virus. Banking on Trump-like people in the US to cover up all his wrongdoings has failed. He died in prison under mysterious circumstances, but it seems he definitely accomplished the assignment given by his “weapons queen.” On the other hand, even if the COVID virus was man-made in China, it has also, on the same footing, managed to expose this part of the US-Israel nexus (which may have been otherwise well hidden to be used only covertly for arm-twisting of other countries like India), making the criminal geopolitical games possible for people like Epstein and his kind.

The movie Roi Roi Binale is poignant in the sense that it asks two simple questions:

1. Why can’t we see, even when a blind suffering child can see and also feel the insult of the insensitive world and its so-called social media?
2. When did MLA (politicians) become “Sir”?