Hurt Sentiments
“Hurting Our Sentiments...”
The above phrase currently provides both excuse and justification for certain special interests to indulge in wanton rioting and vandalism. What India needs is tough legislation, backed by even tougher police action and legal penalties to hurt the ability of such groups to hurt public order – and property.
Playboy once released a satirical video depicting a caricatured Mahatma Gandhi carousing with scantily-clad women. This televisual trash may have “hurt the sentiments” of the Indian diaspora but they had the good sense to deplore it in a civilized way. The tough attitude of the Chicago Police Department and the American Courts towards overly violent public demonstrations of moral outrage might have also had something to do with such model restraint.
A Rajput caste grouping has recently threatened to “burn the nation” if the controversial film Padmavat about a fictional 13th - 14th century legendary queen of Chittor was released. This threat sits oddly with proud Rajput claims of being historic defenders of the Indian nation. Anyway, this assumed status did not avert numerous invasions of India by sundry outsiders in the past - the modern Indian Army and Seema Suraksha Bal (SSB) have had a far more successful track record as guardians of our country’s security.
This kind of attitude was frequently satirized in American cartoonist Al Capp’s SWINE (Students Wildly Indignant Over Nearly Everything) whose hairy thugs regularly went on comic rampages. However, student demonstrations have now become relatively peaceful affairs in North America and Europe with minimal loss of life and damage to property; but it is quite telling that in the land of Gandhi and Ahimsa any kind of political or social grievance is seen as a general licence for unrestricted mob violence. A propensity now also to be seen in gangs of aggressive vigilantes who go by the titles of “Anti-Romeo Squads” and “Gau Rakshaks” lynching perceived offenders without the niceties of due legal process.
This might be an unfortunate by-product of the past freedom struggle against the British Raj. That history established a culture of political protest that has now degenerated into mob violence for the sake of enjoying the adrenalin “high” engendered by unleashed aggression. Our country’s large population of disaffected unemployed youth also provide a large pool of recruits for the violent rent-a-mobs deployed by venal politicians.
Matters aren’t helped by the fact that mobilizing violent mobs is seen by much of India’s political class as a valid form of public expression. Many of the country’s elected representatives seem to feel that inflicting death and destruction on their constituents is just politics as usual. Indeed, success in inciting mass riots with concomitant loss of life and property is probably a measure of proving one’s political prowess nowadays.
Certain votaries of the present party in power feel free to openly incite murder online; especially of those who express dissenting political views or who have the temerity to criticize our “divine” Prime Minister. In any other civilized country governed by the rule of law, such worthies would be up before a court on charges of being a threat to public safety – and face the very real prospect of hefty fines and lengthy terms of imprisonment.
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