Skip to main content

Chetan Bhagat’s Fallacies


According to Chetan Bhagat, a liberal in India today is a person who was born in an upper class family, received English education, absorbed the world culture, carried hotdogs to school in their tiffin box, visited Disneyland, and ridiculed those who spoke English in India with a vernacular accent.  The popular writer said this and much more in his Times of India article yesterday.  He goes on to reduce the current communal disturbances and acts of intolerance to a mere class struggle between the privileged and the underprivileged, the latter being the present-day nationalists whom the former refer to derogatorily as the right-wing, or sanghis, or bhakts, or chaddiwallahs. 

“There is a reason why liberals are derogatorily referred to as pseudo-secular, pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-liberal,” claims Bhagat. “For their agenda is not to be liberal. Their agenda is to look down on the classes that don’t have the global culture advantage.”  He goes on to say that “If, for instance, Modi and Amit Shah had gone to Doon School, or studied in college abroad, or at least spoke English with a refined world accent, the liberals would have been kinder to them.”

Modi and Shah, apparently Bhagat’s greatest contemporary national heroes, enjoy much power now.  They can implement their vision and convert India into a country where all the underprivileged victims of liberal derogation can be emancipated.  A year and a half in power, they should have been able to show something at least in this direction.  Yet what is their contribution so far?  Communal strife.  Feelings of insecurity among certain sections of citizens.  Vandalism of places of worship, which mercifully stopped after a few initial experiments. Appointing Hindutva supporters to important offices.  Rewriting the country’s history in whatever ways they could do so far.  And little in the way of the much vaunted “development.”

And now, the Prime Minister tries to justify everything by comparing his government with the Congress regime.  While campaigning in Bihar a couple of days back, the PM said that the Congress had no right to speak about tolerance because of the anti-Sikh riots that they led in 1984.  What kind of logic is this?  The people of India elected the BJP because it promised to be “the Party with a Difference.”  Now, the PM is saying that they are no different from the Congress. This is not what the people wanted. They wanted DIFFERENCE. 

Even Arun Shourie, former BJP minister, says that BJP now is equal to the Congress plus the Cow.  Yesterday, Mr Shourie counselled the Prime Minister to stop being “a section officer” and be the “leader” of the whole country.  A few days back Mr Ram Jethmalani, also a BJP leader, charged Modi with cheating the people of India.

Now, Mr Chetan Bhagat, do Mr Shourie and Mr Jethmalani belong to your hotdog-chewing liberals?

The worst thing that has happened in India today is the polarisation of the country’s people into Modi-supporters and Modi-baiters when Mr Modi himself has nothing to offer apparently except high rhetoric and vaporous promises.  It is not a liberal versus right-wing fight at all, as Mr Bhagat would like us to believe.  It is not a class war.  It is a communal war which enjoys the tacit support of the ruling party.  If this war is not contained, it will escalate into a civil war.  Nice-sounding sermons on the privileged classes sneering at the underprivileged won’t save the country then. 

The least that the BJP can do is to put the country on the path it promised to people: economic development.  Bring development, provide jobs to the unemployed, deal with farmer suicides, bring inflation under control...  There’s a whole lot of promises to be kept.  Deliver them, please.  And stop cocking a snook at people who are asking for what was promised to them and what is actually required.


Comments

  1. Thank you for the post, a good analysis. Politics rival are nowadays very bitter and politicians say anything to their counterpart. They think everything is fair in love and war. An eye opener post.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. They behave like this because they refuse to address the real issues. They are trying to outwit each other. Trying to show who can shout louder!

      Delete
  2. A neatly elucidated analysis on the musings of a literary hack. It is the job of every pseudo-intellectuals to quell the voices against ruling forces by simple dividing everyone into pro and anti forces. Chetan Bhaghat might have a gift to enamor young urban middle-class fiction readers, but his political stances are more laughable than his fiction. He uses words like 'Anatomy' in his article headings, but what he does is to make bland generalizations on serious issues.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. He is running out of imagination. His fictional themes and narratives have started copying each other. So, maybe, he is discovering his place in politics.

      Delete
  3. Well said. An atmosphere is being created that either you are with us or with Pak. There is no change in economic policies, inflation continues & rhetoric also continues. Bhagat is also in the same mould - bereft of substance.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Precisely.

      Mr Modi can make a lot of meaningful difference if he wants. But he is relishing his own rhetoric!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Ramayana Chronicles: 26 Stories, Endless Wisdom

I’m participating in the A2Z challenge of Blogchatter this year too. I have been regular with this every April for the last few years. It’s been sheer fun for me as well as a tremendous learning experience. I wrote mostly on books and literature in the past. This year, I wish to dwell on India’s great epic Ramayana for various reasons the prominent of which is the new palatial residence in Ayodhya that our Prime Minister has benignly constructed for a supposedly homeless god. “Our Ram Lalla will no longer reside in a tent,” intoned Modi with his characteristic histrionics. This new residence for Lord Rama has become the largest pilgrimage centre in India, drawing about 100,000 devotees every day. Not even the Taj Mahal, a world wonder, gets so many footfalls. Ayodhya is not what it ever was. Earlier it was a humble temple town that belonged to all. Several temples belonging to different castes made all devotees feel at home. There was a sense of belonging, and a sense of simplici...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Independence from Dictators too

Kerala Governor Rajendra Arlekar asked the state to observe ‘Partition Horror Day’ on 14 Aug instead of celebrating the country’s Independence. His organisation, the RSS, as well as its ideological sibling the Hindu Mahasabha, had explicitly directed its members not to celebrate the Independence on 14-15 Aug 1947. From Bombay Chronicle, 9 Aug 1947 Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins gave us a graphic description of what the RSS did on 15 Aug 1947, in their classic book Freedom at Midnight . When the rest of India celebrated its new Independence, the RSS hoisted its own flag, “an orange triangle, emblazoned upon which was the symbol that, in a slightly modified form, had terrorized Europe for a decade, the swastika.” About 500 RSS men stood saluting the swastika on 15 Aug 1947 in Poona. Lapierre and Collins describe the RSS as a “para-fascist movement” whose members “saw themselves as the heirs to those ancient Aryans.” Rajendra Arlekar is an RSS man. He has been doing whate...