The Egypt government’s banning of the Muslim Brotherhood and branding it a terrorist organisation on Wednesday reeks of not only intense hypocrisy but of absolutely and completely derailing the much-hailed revolution that marked the developments of early 2011, also known as the Arab Spring. The popular uprising that toppled the three-decade-long dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak and after the first democratic elections in June 2012, voted in the Mohamad Morsi-led Muslim Brotherhood to power, has been completely quashed. It’s supremely tragic to see the popular protests on the streets of Cairo morph into a gory cycle of bloodshed under the aegis of the Egyptian army under General Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi, viciously targeting Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters. In fact, ever since the July coup ousted Morsi, his political party has not only been subjected to immense persecution, but also tortured, killed and incarcerated indiscriminately. This is a war crime on the part of the Egyptian army, to say the least, but as irony would have it, it the hapless Brotherhood that is paying for its political ambitions, which had been certainly democratic by all means. Given that reports of Saudi money in the ‘coup’ had surfaced in August this year, and with the situation in Egypt hurtling towards a point of no return, how are we to gauge the current quagmire? It is evident that the army, which under Mubarak, had called all the shots for three decades in the country, has played an underhand game to wrest power out of the popularly-elected government, which was wriggling under pressure and burden of high expectations in its less-than-a-year stint to give Egypt a semblance of viable democracy.