There is savage irony in the “double-engine sarkar” shutting down all trains coming to Delhi. Somehow Narendra Modi and Amit Shah forgot that trains run in both directions. They wanted their power to flow out unhindered from Delhi, and now they are terrified of demands of accountability flowing in. Beyond the irony, though, looms the lessons from India’s freedom movement. Had the Sangh Parivar participated in that struggle it may have foreseen some of these, but then, bootlickers are rarely able to see beyond the boot.In that struggle, too, trains played an enormous role. The British Raj was the originator of the railway system in India. It was one of two critical technologies (the other being the telegraph) which used to dominate India, especially after the 1857 Uprising in which a few thousand Britishers died, and a million Indians did. Swift communications, and the swift deployment of troops, became the ways through which the British boot was stamped on Indian heads, and the railways was used to move those boots quickly to where they were needed.How Gandhi used train travel to spread his message across IndiaThe British, too, learned the hard way that trains run in both directions. One of Gandhi’s great strategic initiatives was the use of train travel, in general class, to travel across the length and breadth of the country to spread his message. In 1921 he arrived in Gorakhpur to address a massive rally. The government advocate sent his own buggy to receive him, because his job meant he could not go himself (I should know, he was my grandfather’s brother). People unhitched the horses and put themselves in the harness instead to bring Gandhi to the rally grounds. It was after this speech that Gandhi was increasingly referred to as Mahatma.It was not just the railways, but other institutions of control that Gandhi and other leaders of the freedom turned on their colonial masters. They did this by making them look ridiculous. There is an old saying that in a trial it is the judge who is being judged. Both the guilty party and the innocent party know who is who, the judgement shows whether the judge has the capacity to uncover that, and argue it out in a plain manner. When Mohammed Ali Jinnah defended Bal Gangadhar Tilak in the famous sedition case of 1916, he succeeded in making the British government and the sedition law look ridiculous and the judge was forced to rule in favour of Tilak. Similarly, today, a judiciary that has often given cover to the worst tendencies of an authoritarian regime is being forced to confront the ridiculous nature of what it has allowed, and threaten the government with contempt notices.The Election Commission, in particular, with its ‘clarifications’ in which the only thing clarified is how unethical, illegal, and unconstitutional its actions have been, has gone past being an object of ridicule into something other: an actual threat to democracy as it seems to be more interested in selecting than electing under Gyanesh Kumar.As for the police, Gandhian tactics of non-violent valour, brave individuals walking unarmed in the face of the khaki of government power, bearing atrocities on their body, are as alive now as they have ever been. Take away the colour, ignore the difference in clothing, and the Instagram reels of today mirror those iconic black and white pictures of our country moving, jerkily, towards freedom.The similarities between the British Raj and the present govtThe most important lesson of the earlier freedom struggle, though, is the most difficult one to actually see. The institutions of centralisation, of control, that the British imposed served a purpose – which was to extract wealth for themselves and their friends.They, too, boasted that they had modernised India, had made it into “Viksit Bharat”, that only through their unending rule could India prosper, while at the same time squeezing the wealth from Indians, deporting them to work in foreign lands, recruiting them to die in foreign wars. The railways are the emblem of this great lie. Built by British companies, who were paid by taxes extorted from India, their singular purpose was to control a colonised people from which wealth could be extracted in the most efficient manner.Gandhian non-cooperation turned all that on its head. Non-cooperation became the grit in the system. Protest after protest, facilitated by the very technology used to control Indians showed that Indians were no fools. They understood that promises of “development” without freedom meant neither development nor freedom. And today, in protests that are in themselves the fruit of earlier protests against centralisation, against control, Indians are saying, once again, this is our country, not the sarkar’s. You can promise us anything you want, but we want the freedom to determine our path to development.Gandhi would have smiled.Omair Ahmad has worked as a political analyst and journalist in India, the US and the UK.