Deciphering the forked tongue
In the past few days, a decisive phase seems to have been reached in decoding some of the games that politicians play through the statements they issue from time to time. This is not about the more provocative of these statements, which are reported every day and raise a storm on Twitter. It is about how those provocative statements are later defended, giving us the feeling that we are living on moral quicksand – where nothing is right enough to save us, or wrong enough to sink us.
A man (for that is what he undoubtedly is – a specimen of the species called homo sapiens – even if one would like to assert otherwise) who goes by the name of GVL Narasimha Rao was on the Times Now Channel last evening saying that all that happened in Dadri and after it was a ‘Congress conspiracy to defame the BJP’.
A woman (we shall have to call her this, even with a tinge of regret) by the name of Shazia Ilmi was on another channel, NDTV, refusing to be an apologist for the likes of Sangeet Som, the BJP MLA from Uttar Pradesh who emerges like a proverbial jack-in-the-box at every riot-like situation, making speeches calculated to worsen things a hundredfold. If Ilmi sounded quite different from her stout defence of the BJP just last week in the immediate aftermath of the killing at Dadri of Mohammed Akhlaq, we can put it down to her propensity for flip-flops, without much fuss.
But what the collective prime-time TV shenanigans by two different spokespersons of the BJP show this time is how they are tying themselves up in knots trying harder than ever before to defend the indefensible. I will not go into detail about the foremost pimple of them all – Sambit Patra. It would only serve to weary the reader already affronted by watching him on TV. The mauling that such spokespersons receive at the hands of India’s most aggressive anchor have become routine fare in the past few months.
That is just it. The heinous and the horrendous becoming routine. This is what the government we put in place in May 2014 seems to have ushered in. If a horror a day is not enough to blunt the anger and discontent of the people, then we may actually have to do some work for them, their reasoning seems to be. So pile on these horrors through the mobs that have been well-primed with rumour and recipes for aggression, and jump into any discussion of the same with allegations of media sensationalism or Congress conspiracy.
Such talk reveals the absolute depths to which any form of public discourse has sunk in our country. In 2015, it is ok to have no regard for history, for the values which are supposedly enshrined in our Constitution, or for the intelligence and integrity of your listeners. Everybody invited routinely to TV debates from a political party seems to have left the modicum of manners and decency back in their homes, under lock and key. Shouting and ranting is the method to justify the vilest of crimes. Not a single leader is expressing regret over anything – every killing can be glossed over as the handiwork of ‘excited’ youth.
It is an unrecognizable India for many of us.
Even in pre-Emergency days when we used to turn the papers for some reports on Raj Narain’s comments, then the voice for entertaining diatribes against Indira Gandhi, much of what we took for granted was just the way in which human beings deal with each other – we talk, we listen, we laugh, we cry. Instead, today we seem to shout, play deaf, feign tears and have absolutely no sense of humour because our sentiments are permanently hurt. Does this sound like a brain-damaged lot? It is.
Consider the following excerpt from a piece on Firstpost by R. Jagannathan that appeared yesterday:
This is why the same incident will be viewed differently depending on when – or under whose watch – it happens. A Dadri incident, if it had happened during a Congress regime, would have been treated as an aberration; during BJP rule it will be treated as a vile act that the BJP is directly responsible for even if it happens in a state ruled by a “secular” party like the Samajwadi Party.
“Church incidents” become “church attacks” during BJP rule, but similar “attacks” on Hindu temples – even 20 times the number of church attacks – will be seen as just random events. 2002 will be seen as a major communal riot because it happened under Modi. But an even bigger riot of 1969 gets a footnote in history, for the BJP didn’t exist then. A massacre of Sikhs in 1984 or an Assam communal killing in 2013 will be seen as regrettable but not symptomatic of Congress politics because Congress owns the label “secularism”.
Even as the writer seems to be explaining events in a chronological sense, there is a clever use of inverted commas and emphasis to produce the sub-text –
the Dadri incident has happened under the Samajwadi Party that claims to be secular
bigger communal riots happened in 1969 than in 2002
This is exactly the forked tongue approach in which all members of the BJP in mainstream media and their innumerable trolls and bhakts seem to be speaking. It is impossible for them to take a moral position on any crime, however heinous it is. They are masters of “But”. So one can hear them say, “Yes, Dadri was an unfortunate incident, BUT what happened in 1984?” or some similar construction of sentence. What they cleverly hide by these sly references is the stark reality that the forces behind the communal riots of 1969 were the same as the ones in 2002 – even though they became a political part only in 1980 by the name of the BJP. The forked tongue wants no examination of history, no examination of any larger context for violence apart from what they provide – “excited youth”, “meat was found in a dustbin” etc.
It is significant that some of the voices that have spoken out clearly against what happened at Dadri come from the sadhu community of Ayodhya. As battle-hardened veterans of the violence and chaos unleashed by the demolition in 1992, they know the means and methods of the rumour-mongering forked tongue, and are not hesitating in letting their fellow citizens know what they feel about Dadri.
How long can we continue to listen to such justifications and denials? Is it too late to reclaim our discourse, all that we say and think every day on so many matters affecting all of us?
We have to learn again to speak in unambiguous “noes” to all the threats, blandishments and false explanations of the forked tongues.
