Did you try puppy linux? It has excellent support for older hardware. I remember that there were some older versions that would even run flawlessly on my 192MB RAM ancient desktop, over a decade ago. Give it a try

This is in my home state. The festival in question is Dasara and the inauguration is to offer first prayers to the deity and the procession of the idol on an elephant. This is a proper Hindu festival and procession. The issue here is not only that she is a Muslim, but she is staunchly against idol worship and has given many statements regarding the same. How can she inaugurate the procession and offer first prayers when she is opposed to it?

The political issue is that the openly Hindu hating party that is in power in the state (Indian National Congress) wants to do many such controversial things to degrade Hindus while chanting “secularism” and appeasing Muslims.

We are not! We do have skirmishes with China once in a while, especially on border issues, but no war or any sort of active engagement.

I have an odd recommendation. Install puppy Linux on it. Years ago, it was my default choice for older machines like this. It runs completely on RAM, has extremely small footprint, extremely snappy and very featureful. I think over the years, the development has stagnated. However, you should be able to get a few years old ISO, copy it to a USB stick and you are good to go. The ISOs are usually in the range of 100-150 MB. Even if your laptop has just 1-4 GB of RAM, this will fly. Oh, by the way, it has most (types of) applications out of the box. It has native support for older hardware.