{"id":69898,"date":"2019-06-18T01:52:45","date_gmt":"2019-06-17T20:22:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/?p=69898"},"modified":"2019-06-18T01:52:45","modified_gmt":"2019-06-17T20:22:45","slug":"bandh-karo-ye-natak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/2019\/06\/18\/bandh-karo-ye-natak\/","title":{"rendered":"Bandh karo ye natak!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nGrowing Chauvinism<\/strong><\/h2>\n

By Poonam I Kaushish<\/strong><\/p>\n

Your freedom ends where my nose begins and one man\u2019s food is another man\u2019s poison. Two adages, a succinct testimony to the ongoing maelstrom thanks to our netagan\u2019s handling of two incidents, one in West Bengal and the other in ulta-pulta UP. Which underscore the ugly side of power out of control!
\nIn the first, life came to a grinding halt across India when junior doctors went on strike in support of two colleagues\u2019 in Kolkata who were attacked and seriously injured by relatives of a patient who died at a hospital. Compounding matters, Chief Minister Mamata\u2019s high-handedness by threatening doctors to resume work resulted in over 400 senior doctors of various State-run hospitals resigning. Even as no hospital would like its doctors to be hit or strike, Mamata too should exercise restraint and apologize.
\nIn the second, a journalist is arrested by the UP police for posting a video \u2018maligning\u2019 Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath by a woman claiming she had sent a marriage proposal on Twitter and Facebook to him. He was released after three days by the Supreme Court asserting \u201cthe right to liberty is non-negotiable\u201d and \u201cfree speech cannot be gagged for fear of the mob.\u201d
\nYou could have fooled me. For yet another presswallah was thrashed, stripped, urinated in his mouth and arrested by policemen for covering a train derailment. In Bangaluru, Chief Minister Kumaraswamy jailed another for \u201cbelittling us. Do we look like cartoon characters to you? Who gave you the authority?\u201d
\nDittoes, mercurial Mamata who imprisoned b\u00eate noire BJP\u2019s youth leader for a meme she posted on Facebook which superimposed her face on actress Priyanka Chopra\u2019s Met Gala 2019 look. She was released on bail but asked to tender an unconditional written apology.
\nIn Tripura too, the police arrested two newsmen for posting \u201cfake news\u201d about Chief Minister Biplab Deb\u2019s personal life on Facebook. In Orissa a journalist was jailed for a \u201cderogatory and very, very objectionable\u201d tweet about erotic sculptures in the 13th century Konark Sun Temple, another 19-year old Uttarakhand village lad was detained for sharing an \u2018offensive and morphed\u2019 photo of Prime Minister Modi.
\nSadly, violence and intolerance is the rhetoric of our times. Pick any newspaper or surf any TV channel any day. Splashes of social schism gore into news headlines. Curse all you want, it\u2019s for a cause, remember. Undoubtedly, India thrives on protests. Which has perfected the old saying \u201cjiski laathi uski bhains\u201d!
\nTurn North, South, East or West the story is the same. In fact, no day passes without a strike somewhere or an arrest for intolerable behaviour. Be it a mohalla, district or State. Shockingly, over 50 people were arrested last year for social media posts. Whereby any film, book or story which pokes fun or is out of sync with our leaders thinking, cause and outlook is considered an act of sedition and the writer or film-maker arrested.
\nWorse, don\u2019t like a tweet? Arrest the person. Hate a film? Collect a crowd and burn the theatres down? Don\u2019t like a novelist\u2019s book? Get the Government to ban it or issue a fatwa against the author.
\nRaising, a moot point: Are strikes and cartoons, tweets, memes on social media actually expressions of freedom or are they means of suppressing fundamental rights in a democracy? Is the polity afraid of the clash of ideas in our public life?
\nArguably, not a few would simply shrug it off with \u201csab chalta hai attitude, this is Mera Bharat Mahan at its rudest and crassest best.\u201d Many would assert ki pharak painda hai. The cause is immaterial. It is all about registering ones protest, the louder the better. Success is measured in terms of causing maximum dislocation and discomfiture to people.
\nInstances are plenty. Remember an innocuous cartoonist Assem Trivedi was arrested for sedition by Mamata in Kolkata. Before him another of his tribe famed Shankar cartoons of Ambedkar in NCERT school books were posthumously removed. Tamil Nadu banned noted actor-director Kamal Hasan\u2019s 100 crore magna opus Viswaroopam which dealt with the issue of terrorism on the fallacious that it would hurt the sentiments of \u2018unknown\u2019 Muslim groups and create a law and order problem. Notwithstanding if India\u2019s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, called sedition laws \u201cobjectionable and obnoxious\u201d.
\nWhat our leaders seems to forget is that there is something called Article 19 of the Constitution which states: \u201cAll citizens shall have the right (a) to freedom of speech and expression\u2026\u201d. It is not an absolute right. Pertinently, democracy is neither mobocracy nor a license to create bedlam. It is a fine balance between rights and duties, liberties and responsibilities. One\u2019s freedom pre-supposes another\u2019s responsibilities and liberty
\nThe question thus needs to be addressed is should abominable conduct by those in power be condoned? Can leaders behave callously? Is the polity afraid of the clash of ideas in our public life? Can a Chief Minister just issue an ultimatum without hearing the aggrieved parties? Should netas be a law unto themselves and rule by law? Only the other day, a MP threatened an airline\u2019s staff.
\nBesides, if politicians behave preposterously as some of them often do, why do they and others expect not to be mocked? Don\u2019t we live in a free country? Ridiculing the ridiculous is not and cannot be a crime, at least in a democracy. One cannot live life in the slim strip called the official and every joke, wit, satire, humour or defiance treated as a monster.
\nIn this milieu who do we turn too? Certainly, we do not need self-appointed guardians to tell us what we can see or read, what we can wear, eat or drink. We should be free to believe what we want, whom and how we should love, worship the way we want. Else, at this rate the day is not far when India could soon resemble Saudi Arabia or N Korea which have dispensed with producing movies altogether and punish those who lampoon leaders.
\nAt the same time our doctors need to understand that democracy is neither mobocracy nor a license to create bedlam. It is a fine balance between rights and duties, liberties and responsibilities. One\u2019s freedom pre-supposes another\u2019s responsibilities and liberty. Paralysing the State, to get attention and policy reversals only exasperates the public and inconveniences them. Using strong-arm tactics gets one nowhere as temporary respite is no answer for building a socially cohesive society.
\nWhere does India go from here? Our netas need to see how public figures across the globe are more tolerant about what\u2019s written or depicted about them. A classic example of political freedom is former Italian millionaire-playboy-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi who was mercilessly satirized in the print and online forums globally. Americans and Britishers take a lot of liberties vis-\u00e0-vis their rulers.
\nIn sum, the message has to go out clearly that the right of the citizen is paramount. No leader or group can threaten violence, and if they do, they lose their democratic right to be heard. We are a civilized democracy, remember coercion has a thousand fathers, while liberty is an orphan. As George Orwell said, if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. Can liberty survive in a country where even jest tends to get criminalised? Our leaders must desist from using narrow-mindedness and prejudices as pedestals to stand on to be seen. At some point we have to stand up and bellow, \u201cBandh karo ye natak!\u201d\u2014- INFA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Growing Chauvinism By Poonam I Kaushish Your freedom ends where my nose begins and one man\u2019s food is another man\u2019s poison. Two adages, a succinct testimony to the ongoing maelstrom thanks to our netagan\u2019s handling of two incidents, one in West Bengal and the other in ulta-pulta UP. Which underscore the ugly side of power […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-69898","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-features"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69898\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}