Insecurity of the Vice President

We live in a time when those who point out the crimes become criminals while those who perpetrate the crimes become heroes. The digital assaults on vice president Hamid Ansari are recent examples. Does the vice president deserve the assaults?

It was a long interview that vice president Ansari gave to Karan Thapar on Rajya Sabha TV. Some so-called nationalists have focused their attention on a fraction of what the VP said: “… there is a feeling of unease, a sense of insecurity creeping in.” He said that in answer to Karan Thapar’s question whether Indian Muslims are feeling insecure in the present India.

Credit: PTI

Why should such a large number of people take exception to Ansari’s answer? Isn’t it plain truth that there are many communities of people, not just Muslims but also the Dalits and many others, who are feeling terribly insecure in present India? Religious minorities have ample reasons to feel insecure as they are attacked in various devious ways by the Sangh Parivar affiliates. The poor sections have reasons to feel insecure as subsidies and other welfare schemes are being eliminated one by one. Prices of essential things keep rising making livelihood near impossible for large sections of Indians. Unemployment rate is mounting sky-high. Crimes are rising in numbers, varieties and degrees. Those who were friends till yesterday turn away their faces when they see you today. People are afraid of each other. We don’t know who will stab you from the back the next moment.

What was wrong when the vice president mentioned “insecurity feeling”? How many Indians actually feel secure today?

Apart from the air that is vitiated totally inside the country are the problems looming beyond the borders. Both Pakistan and China are getting ready to declare war on the country because of 56-inch foreign policies.

Yet certain citizens are accusing the vice president merely for pointing out the insecurity feeling of certain sections of people instead of looking at the problems that loom large in the horizons like formidable monsters. We have become a strange country indeed!

Comments

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

Being Christian in BJP’s India

A moment of triumph for India’s women’s cricket team turned unexpectedly into a controversy about religious faith and expression, thanks to some right-wing footsloggers. After her stellar performance in the semi-final of the Wormen’s World Cup (2025), Jemimah Rodrigues thanked Jesus for her achievement. “Jesus fought for me,” she said quoting the Bible: “Stand still and God will fight for you” [1 Samuel 12:16]. Some BJP leaders and their mindless followers took strong exception to that and roiled the religious fervour of the bourgeoning right wing with acerbic remarks. If Ms Rodrigues were a Hindu, she would have thanked her deity: Ram or Hanuman or whoever. Since she is a Christian, she thanked Jesus. What’s wrong in that? If she was a nonbeliever like me, God wouldn’t have topped the list of her benefactors. Religion is a talisman for a lot of people. There’s nothing wrong in imagining that some god sitting in some heaven is taking care of you. In fact, it gives a lot of psychologic...

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 wisdom of the Mahabharata

Illustration by Gemini AI “Krishna touches my hand. If you can call it a hand, these pinpricks of light that are newly coalescing into the shape of fingers and palm. At his touch something breaks, a chain that was tied to the woman-shape crumpled on the snow below. I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable – but I always was so, only I never knew it! I am beyond the name and gender and the imprisoning patterns of ego. And yet, for the first time, I’m truly Panchali. I reach with my other hand for Karna – how surprisingly solid his clasp! Above us our palace waits, the only one I’ve ever needed. Its walls are space, its floor is sky, its center everywhere. We rise; the shapes cluster around us in welcome, dissolving and forming and dissolving again like fireflies in a summer evening.” What is quoted above is the final paragraph of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel The Palace of Illusions which I reread in the last few days merely because I had time on my hands and this book hap...

Hollow Leaders

A century ago, T S Eliot wrote about the hollowness of his countrymen in a poem titled The Hollow Men . The World War I had led to a lot of disillusionment with the collapse of powerful empires and the savagery of the war itself which unleashed barbaric slaughter. The generation that survived was known as the “Lost Generation.” Before the war, Western civilisation was sustained by certain values and principles given by religion, the Enlightenment, and Victorian morality. The war showed that science and technology, which could improve life, had actually produced machine guns, gas warfare, and mass death. Religion became hollow. People became hollow. “We are the hollow men,” Eliot’s poem began. The civilisation looked sophisticated from outside, but it was empty inside. There is a lot of religion today in the world. My country has allegedly become so religious that it decides what you will eat, wear, which god you will pray to, and even the language for communication. The ultimat...

Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Search This Blog