Skip to main content

Shashi Tharoor and Crime in India

I don’t know if Shashi Tharoor abetted Sunanda Pushkar’s suicide. I don’t know whether it was suicide or natural death. I know one thing, however: India today is a country where anyone can become a criminal overnight and anyone can become a saint overnight depending on which political party you belong to or get support from.

We have a Prime Minister whose complicity in the 2002 Gujarat riots is not a secret at all. You can kill hundreds of people, drive out thousands from their homes and sow the seeds of communal hatred in the whole country and still be a hero in India. The most powerful person in the country after the PM, Amit Shah, was notorious as an encounter killer until he put on a saintly halo round his fat face after his best friend became the most powerful man in the country.

Yogi Adityanath just wrote off all the criminal cases against him when he became the Chief Minister of the most crime-ridden state in the country. 20,000 cases against politicians in Uttar Pradesh are wiped off history by the man who wears an ascetic’s robes which look more farcical on him than outrageous.

The ruling BJP has the highest number of lawmakers with cases of crimes against women. The party has supported crimes against minority communities and Dalits. All the promises made by that party about bringing clean governance were only “chunavi jumla” (electoral gimmick) as Ram Jethmalani said last year.

Everything – well, almost – is a gimmick in the country today. The reality is a bizarre monster hiding behind charming masks designed by the world’s best costume designers. According to latest reports, BJP has spent ₹4300 crore on publicity alone after Modi became the Prime Minister. Publicity. Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth, as Goebbels the Guru of RSS said and our Prime Minister exhorted as in the video below.


It’s a hilariously tragic state of affairs in the country. Fair is foul and foul is fair, Shakespeare would say. Hard luck, Shashi!

Comments

  1. Tharoor's 'Why I Am a Hindu' book might have irritated the medieval guys. But again I don't know if anyone from their side knows to read.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've just started reading that book and found it mesmerising. But it cannot be just the book; it must have something to do with some of his recent remarks about the party as well as the approaching elections.

      Delete
  2. Very true. But actually, it's not just in the case of crime, but in many other senses as well.
    I find no political party better than the other. Every party has a few very good leaders; but most of them, especially at the local levels, leave a lot to be desired.
    Look at what is happening in Goa, Manipur, now in Karnataka.
    Every party, for once, is being disrobbed simultaneously.
    A very sad state of affairs. And, these are the people who take very important policy decisions that impact our lives and future.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The real tragedy of a country is lack of a visionary leader. We suffer from that now. When I mentioned the blatant gimmicks employed by BJP in Karnataka, her instant response was, "We know BJP is a party of goons, so no surprise. But what about other parties?" True. What about other parties? Cry my beloved country.

      Delete

Post a Comment

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

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r