Politics without aesthetics

Haryana’s Chief Minister Khattar once asked why women didn’t walk around naked if they wanted to prove their freedom.  You and I, like other rational creatures, will naturally wonder what the connection is between freedom and nudity.  Do the menfolk of Khattar’s state, who have all kinds of bizarre systems of justice like khap panchayats, walk around naked in order to prove their freedom?  Or, are they not free?

Well, logic does not play any significant role in Haryana, it seems.  Or for that matter, logic seems to have little to do with Khattar’s party in general.  It is a party which harps on the string of women empowerment through enthralling slogans such beti bachao, beti padhao and so on.  In actual practice, however, the party men want women to play the age-old conventional roles and sit at home with their faces buried behind veils.  The men won’t even hesitate to stalk those women who dare to be out especially after dark as it happened the other day in Chandigarh, the state’s capital.  

Source: NDTV

Haryana’s BJP leaders have spoken against women’s liberties time and again.  But asking them to walk about naked in the name of freedom or whatever indicates the rot that is afflicting the attitudes of the men.  When they keep their women packaged neatly behind traditional attires including the face veil, their deepest desires spring out of their dark Freudian recesses through the kind of statements made by none other than the Chief Minister.

Khattar and others of his kind must come to terms with that inner darkness.  As light begins to dissipate that darkness, they will begin to see certain realities a little more clearly.  For example, that women have their own rights.  They don’t need the men to dictate terms to them.  That age is past.  We live in a time when women have proved undoubtedly that they can do all the works that men do, perhaps even better.  Just because RSS, BJP’s grandmother, does not like women, it does not mean that women continue to be the kind of household goods and chattels that ancient patriarchs like Manu viewed them as. 

At any rate, asking them walk around naked displays a tremendous dearth of aesthetic sense, to say the least.  Well, no sane person would expect our politicians to possess aesthetics.  We don’t expect charcoal to transmute into diamonds despite the chemical connections between them. 

Khattar ji, one of the reasons for inventing clothes was to add beauty (as well as dignity) to the human body.  You see, we humans don’t have the grace of the naked swans or the gazelles, nor the majesty of the naked lions and elephants, not even the symmetry of Blake’s tiger.  Just imagine a world of naked men and women.  I’m sure you won’t really like it.  Otherwise stand naked in front of your bedroom mirror and look at yourself for a moment.

Please stop selling crap to us though we know you people are in love with the dung and urine of certain animals.  Okay, we tolerate quite a bit of excreta.  How much do you really want us to swallow?