Skip to main content

Chatur Baniya and Amit Shah




Amit Shah is a chatur baniya. His political career is mired in filth and blood.  He has used devious methods to bring his party to power in his own as well as other states and also to eliminate enemies.  He is the master of trickery and even encounter killings are part of his arsenal.  He knows how to get what he wants.  Recently he was in Kerala where he hurled an ultimatum to the party workers: win at any cost.  Clashes broke out in Kerala from the very next day.  Sooner than later, Amit Shah can take pride in destroying the communal harmony that existed in Kerala for decades.

Courtesy C P Sharma
Amit Shah knows how to use power effectively.  His party is changing the history textbooks wherever it is in power.  In the new textbooks, the tin heroes of RSS like Savarkar have displaced the real heroes like Mahatma Gandhi.  The entire freedom struggle is being shown in a different light.  The history of the country is being rewritten entirely.  Fair becomes foul and vice versa.  That’s Amit Shah’s magic.  The magic of the chatur baniya.

We all tend to judge other people according to our own standards.  If I am a jealous person, I see jealousy in everybody else.  If I am greedy, I tend to judge all others as motivated by greed.  Similarly, Amit Shah has judged that Mahatma Gandhi was a chatur baniya. 

Gandhi was clever, no doubt.  He was a baniya by caste.  So Amit Shah is not wrong entirely.  Yet he is terribly, terribly wrong.  Gandhi was far, far more than a chatur baniya. 

Gandhi had a clear and profound vision which embraced the whole of humanity.  His entire philosophy was based on love and compassion and a deep understanding of human nature.  In spite of all the drawbacks he had as a human being as well as visionary, Gandhi towers infinitely above the puny minds like Amit Shah. 

Amit Shah and his BJP may remove Gandhi and other great people from history textbooks.  They may warp the impressionable minds of the present students.  They may saffronise the entire country.  But any edifice constructed on a slimy foundation will come tumbling down in the due course of time.  Gandhi will go on shining in the history books for ages to come.  Amit Shah will vanish from them like a mushroom that shot up accidentally though venomously.  The venom will spread some plague for a while, no doubt.  But mankind knows how to overcome plagues too. 


Comments

  1. Drawbacks of Gandhi! I would like to know your reasons to say so ( perhaps another blog? :). I have heard about some criticisms, but what exactly were his faults? I haven't read any non fictions based on Gandhi, so I lack the proper understanding.

    Amit Shah is a very intelligent person, a king maker whom I consider as a modern day Chanakya. He and Hemanta Biswa Sarma of Assam carry a uncanny resemblance and it is only a matter f time that their associations would bring something disastrous to the political situation.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Everyone has limitations, however great one may be. Gandhi too had. His views on technology and development were too idealistic, for example. His notions on medical science and the way he denied his wife certain food on idealistic grounds are questionable....

      I have described Shah as Chanakya many times. He is that. If only he could use that brain for better purposes!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

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...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...

Dharma and Destiny

  Illustration by Copilot Designer Unwavering adherence to dharma causes much suffering in the Ramayana . Dharma can mean duty, righteousness, and moral order. There are many characters in the Ramayana who stick to their dharma as best as they can and cause much pain to themselves as well as others. Dasharatha sees it as his duty as a ruler (raja-dharma) to uphold truth and justice and hence has to fulfil the promise he made to Kaikeyi and send Rama into exile in spite of the anguish it causes him and many others. Rama accepts the order following his dharma as an obedient son. Sita follows her dharma as a wife and enters the forest along with her husband. The brotherly dharma of Lakshmana makes him leave his own wife and escort Rama and Sita. It’s all not that simple, however. Which dharma makes Rama suspect Sita’s purity, later in Lanka? Which dharma makes him succumb to a societal expectation instead of upholding his personal integrity, still later in Ayodhya? “You were car...