The Birth of a New Retardation

Days ago there was a great uproar inside the temple of Indian Democracy. Flag bearers and members of the Indian polity cried foul, and some even went to the extent of calling a full fledged commission to enquire into the very ‘serious matter’.

Now, coming to the crux of the whole situation, to exactly what had happened inside the sanctum sanctorum of the great temple of the Indian Democracy. Some of the very ‘over-sensitive’ (no skin conditions) politicians, some of them supposedly belonging to the Dalit communities, raised their eyebrows with their eyes red resembling those of mad bulls being heckled, taunted and pierced with long darts by graceful matadors.

“Unacceptable”! They cried in total unison, “How dare this cartoonist can depict Amedkar, our prophet, our leader and our beacon, being whipped and that too while sitting on a snail”? It echoed and the entire country felt it. The incident took to a new extent the level of political hypocrisy, and thus giving an ‘extra dimension’ to the derogatory term ‘as hypocrite as an Indian. It was, well, another shameful episode inside the temple of Indian Democracy with our incorrigible politicians crying injustice over a cartoon composed sixty years ago.

Sixty years ago! Yes, six decades ago the very piece of satirical cartoon made its debut in its endeavour to highlight the slow pace in drafting the very soul of Indian Democracy-The Constitution. It can easily be on of the world’s greatest political ironies, and probably it could be put on a pedestal of the greatest buffoonery. The man, a political erudite, a visionary, a fighter and a pioneer in championing the rights of the very oppressed in India does not need a satirical cartoon to bring him down, as the requisite Molotov cocktail to ‘whip’ and aggravate the usual communal ‘flare-ups’ is rightly being put to usage by the very false representatives for the oppressed we love to call as ‘Dalits’.

Babasaheb Ambedkar was neither a racist nor a xenophobe. He fought tooth and nail against caste prejudices and acute oppression. Hindus, the upper castes defiled their own greatest non-monotheistic religion in the world, and what it could have been the greatest liberal and enlightening religion in the world was put into a miserable corner like pushing a poor mad woman in tatters into a dark corner, only to become a stereotype signifying complications giving birth to a million complications. And instead of finding a cure and an antidote the alms seeking feather brained and malicious political representatives raised hues and cries over the satirical piece citing that satirical caricatures will corrupt tender and young minds. Yeah! As if your shenanigans are not enough to create a ripple in the tender and young minds, your nauseating sense of approaching the valued vote banks is improper enough to disturb the normal flow of thoughts amongst the young and definitely restless.

The most laughable cause and effect rhetoric since George W Bush cited Iraq as the probable harbinger of evil to befall the mighty USA, ever to be applied and giving birth to a new retardation of a different kind. Critics may apply the logical fact of India being a country of ‘sensitive’ people, and such adventures create tensions as Ambedkar was almost a prophet for the Dalits and caution must be exercised. Really! Then why was Ranbir Sena given a free hand. It was nothing but a Bhojpuri version of the Ku Klux Klan. When an Indian student gets slapped by an Aussie thug or gets mugged an English ruffian we raise our hammer and tongs and call the entire White Race as racists. We cannot even think of showing respects towards the north easterners and the secluded Jarwes, Ongloes and the Sentinelese, how on earth can someone as ‘erudite’ as we could find an avenue to introspect and grasp the meaning of what exactly is brewing inside the nascent minds of some of our politicians and to be able to read between the lines.

We rush to the kirana commercial shop to get a sachet of facial cream (sachet, mind it, we are miser too) to make ourselves look fair and to some extent lovely too, in order to woo the most popular lass or a bloke just around the corner but it wouldn’t need a running to decipher what really is happening in political pitch. The woman street fighter ordered the arrest of a professor for making a satire out of her (now she is creating a space through which she can wreck havoc on her fellow seers and peers as the aimless representatives are desperate to flex their muscles whilst choosing the President of India), and the torch bearers of the dalit cause are inciting a ban on the toons that dared to satire Ambedkar.

And now running almost on a collision course another satirical representations have come under attack. This time it is from the south where it is sacrilegious to speak a specific language. (Call it bullying of the linguistic kind, and where the pitch of regional chauvinism is put on a tall pedestal) the subject of this time toon anathema is about the right to speak a classic language.

This writer can go on writing, running into thousands and thousands of words and infuse vocabularies and subtlety with or without the delight of one particular reader, but who cares. When the nation is being swallowed by nasty desires of some, we can bask in our ignorance and tune into some frequency churning out copied melodies from every nook and corners of the world.