“Toilet ek Prem Katha” does its best to please the powers that be, and it appears to have succeeded. But it is not the story of my village or the many others like it that had come a long way well before Swachh Bharat Mission became a buzzword, and long before Modi came to power.

Sabhyata, or civilization, did not begin in 2014.

Read the full opinion piece published in Nikkei Asian Review on October 5, 2017, here.