Chicanery – Learn English: Lesson 1

Example 1

Addressing a rally in Kerala yesterday, BJP’s high priest Amit Shah accused Kerala of being a killing field. “More than 120 BJP workers have been martyred,” he declared.

The fact: “Police records with details of every political murder between 2000 and 2017 accessed exclusively by NDTV impugn both the political fronts in Kerala. In the last 17 years, 85 CPM workers, 65 RSS or BJP workers, 11 workers of Congress and IUML each have been killed - mostly by their political rivals including CPM and RSS or BJP.” [Source: NDTV]

Example 2

Today the assistant high priest Yogi Adityanath addressed the same yatra flagged off yesterday by the Supreme High Priest and said that Kerala should learn how to run hospitals from UP.

The fact: Kerala has the best medical care system in the country. It has efficiently run hospitals in every town and health centres in most villages. Almost all the villages except in some tribal areas have primary health centres with a variety of medical streams such as Ayurveda, Homeopathy and Unani. There is an exemplary palliative care system in the state. Kerala has the lowest infant mortality rate in the country and the best child care systems. Who has forgotten the death of numerous children in UP recently due to sheer neglect? Yet this man, a Yogi and a chief minister to boot, dares to utter such blatant lies in no other place than Kerala.

Exercise

Use the word chicanery to make meaningful sentences.

1. BJP’s chicanery has crossed all limits.

2. While colonial America looked upon lawyers as mere traders who earned a questionable living by chicanery, contemporary India makes use of some questionable traders to perpetuate chicanery as the ruling party’s official political tool.

3. “Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.” John Adams

4. When hundreds of people are being killed in the cow belt India in the name of cow protection, the Jan Raksha Yatra organised in Kerala by the BJP is sheer political chicanery.

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