Skip to main content

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

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 Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...

No Problems Only Opportunities

You’ve probably heard this joke. A young man walked into his office one morning and found a beautiful young lady sitting in his chair. He called the MD and said, “Sir, I have a problem.” The MD replied, “Don’t you know our company’s motto, young man? No Problems, Only Opportunities .” When Suchita of The Blogchatter sent me a mail with the topic of this week’s blog hop –  - the first thing that came to my mind was the above joke. I know many people – too many, in fact – who went through terrible problems. My own life was a series of problems in none of which was there the consolation of any beautiful woman. One essential lesson I learnt from life is that life is a series of problems. You solve one and then arises the next one. Now I have reached an age when problems are no more problems: they are life itself. If you ask me what was the biggest problem I ever dealt with, it was my last years in Shillong. I was a lecturer in a college drawing a fat salary stipulated by the U...