Being politically correct in a growingly intolerant India

Futuristic dispatches from a vertically and horizontally challenged journalist in the aftermath of the rage to wage war and the itch to bitch about anyone who mouths words not deemed politically correct

shantanu

Shantanu Datta | January 28, 2013



Warning: This is a politically correct report. The author does not take responsibility for any or all of the words, actions, theses, syndromes (whether actual or perceived), typecasts or typos you will come across in the words strung together to form sentences underneath this disclaimer.
Warning 2: Read with a pinch, handful or bucketful of salt.
 
Dateline: Delhi. Timeline: January 28, 2014

In an out of the ordinary scene, somewhat akin to an age when people used to hurl stones at one another following a row that became violent and which was subsequently taken over by the age when people would hurl abuses and further on to the age when people criticised each other in public, a leading BJP leader today called Rahul Gandhi, the Congress party’s number two leader in the hierarchical ladder, insight-challenged.

“If Rahul Gandhi has much political intelligence, my neighbour does, too. And my neighbour’s wife says she is yet to figure out the political axiom he espouses or the axe he grinds in the years since their marriage,” the BJP leader said, in an oblique reference to Gandhi’s challenge to Narendra Modi to take him on in the 2014 elections.

Gandhi, the opposition leader said, is also vision-challenged, which many analysts misread and misheard, overread and overlooked as meaning visually challenged. “Rahul Gandhi does not have a vision for the future,” the leader said, referring to Gandhi’s decision to look at 2014 elections as what they are — the elections in 2014 — and make statements accordingly, rather than what many analysts want them to be: a vision and mission statement ejected out of Gandhi’s mouth each time he opens it.

A senior Congress functionary, meanwhile, joined the debate by sending what many analysts prefer calling verbal missiles, or “shooting back”. According to this leader, Narendra Modi, the Gujarat chief minister who is set to face Gandhi in the game to elect the country’s prime minister, is playing politics with an event in Gujarat in 2002 that left many people dead, and what many have earlier called a “riot” between people of two different streams of faith that is called “religion” in many parts of the globe. “He is dividing communities along the communal line, something he has done in all elections before, during and after 2002,” he said, referring to the very same events, which had once prompted Congress president Sonia Gandhi to dub Modi “moth ka saudagar”, referring to the above-mentioned riotous unrest in the state.

While many analysts also called the exact word Sonia G used as “maut”, this reporter fails to be tempted to use such detestable words that have the potential to induce/espouse hate.

A top source in the BJP headquarters in New Delhi, however, refused to see reason or logic. Smiling in a fashion called “sardonic” by many expert readers of smiles, grins, smirks and laughter, he said, “Modi-ji never exploited riots. The Congress has exploited the riots, primarily in an attempt to exploit the BJP’s perceived notion as a party that does not believe in secularism, as printed in the Constitution in pretty large and bold typeface.”

The Congress leader denied that the party has done anything to that effect.

Reached for his comments, sociologist Ashis Nandy, eminent social scientist for those who cared to read him and nationally famous for his historically infamous January 2012 statement at Jaipur Lit Festival calling SCs, STs and OBCs as a community of people that believe in aping the people in purportedly higher echelons of the caste ladder in practising peculiarly pecuniary vices (called “corruption” by many analysts), said he has no comments to offer to this reporter unless he stops being politically correct, prompting this reporter to beat a hasty retreat.
 

 

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