Uttar Pradesh: Mulayam’s Hindi is Akhilesh’s English

'Son, the Hindi for ... SIM card is...' 

Recycling is an environment-friendly process and old things, as much as possible, should be recycled. However, it’s another thing to recycle old ideas, especially the redundant ones. Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav’s call to ban the use of English language in Parliament should be seen in this light. Mr Yadav was speaking at a function at Etawah in Uttar Pradesh where he said that many leaders had a ‘double standard’ when it came to Hindi, as they asked for votes in Hindi but spoke in English in Parliament. His suggestion to use one’s mother tongue in Parliament is a flawed one and does not act in the favour of his idea to promote Hindi. The mother tongue of more than half of the members of the Lok Sabha is not Hindi and if one were to take heed of the SP leader’s suggestion, there would be more than 20 different languages spoken on the floor of the House. The resultant scene can only be described as pandemonium.
To look at English as a vestige of our colonial past is wrong, as today the language belongs to all its users, both native and non-native speakers. In a multi-lingual country like India, where dialects of the same language change every 100 kilometres, English is the lingua franca and linguam primarium. English is a thread that connects various states and cultures. Many states in India have suffered because of an aversion towards English — the case of West Bengal is an example. India’s IT/ITES revolution owes its success a great deal to the language. Many of the political leaders who talk about the need to shun English make it a point to send their children to English-medium schools and to universities in the US, the UK or Australia.
This fall back on the attitude towards the usage of English by the Samajwadi Party leader shows the party’s paucity of ideas in this election season. Uttar Pradesh, where the party runs the government, has recently been in the news for the wrong reasons like the communal tension in Muzaffarnagar, which saw many people die and scores of people living in relief camps months after the riots. The healthcare scenario, with a high infant mortality rate, is not very impressive and there is a lot of scope for improvement. Rather than focusing on these and other pressing issues, Mulayam Singh’s statement has shown that the hope placed on a young Akhilesh Yadav as the chief minister of the most populous state in the country was misplaced. The young chief minister of UP, who himself holds a degree from the University of Sydney, Australia, must work towards dispelling the impression that his government and party are resorting to retrograde ways to reach out to the people and instead take all the steps towards putting the state on the development path. Shunning English is not a step in the right direction.

Khalid Mujahid: Custodial deaths and terror suspects

The death of terror suspect Khalid Mujahid, on Saturday, while being escorted by police from court to Lucknow jail has turned the heat on the state police and administration by a few notches. Mujahid, along with Tariq Qasmi, was arrested for allegedly being involved in the bomb blasts that took place in the Lucknow and Faizabad courts in 2007 and in the Gorakhpur blasts the same year. Right from the time of the arrests there has been allegations of police highhandedness and targeting of the minority community. The Samajwadi Party had promised in its election manifesto to review the cases against ‘innocent’ Muslim youth lodged in jails on terror charges. Accordingly it moved the Barabanki court in April seeking a withdrawal of the cases against Mujahid and Qasmi. The court rejected the plea.
While an FIR has been filed blaming 42 police personnel for the death of Mujahid, including a former DGP of Uttar Pradesh, the state has asked for a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death. Relatives have alleged that there were signs of torture on Mujahid’s body. One of the things the death of Khalid Mujahid points to is the indifferent attitude shown by the Akilesh Yadav government to the RD Nimesh Commission report. The commission, constituted by the Mayawati government, had submitted its report in August and is believed to have found a lot of discrepancies with the police version of the arrests of Mujahid and Qasmi. It still isn’t clear as to why has the state government not acted upon the suggestions by the commission. This also leads to the greater question of why do governments fail to act on the recommendations put forward by enquiry commissions. Such inaction leads to public discontent and loss of faith in the government’s commitment towards the people.
Khalid Mujahid’s death is not the first instance of custodial death and unless there are serious changes in the way the police function and in the way cases are handled this might not be the last. All cases, especially terror-related, need to be handled swiftly and the officials investigating the case need to be held responsible for undue delays.

Politicians are not above the law — Boston showed that to Azam Khan

In what can be only seen as a new high — or low — in political paranoia UP urban development minister Azam Khan has said that his detention at the Boston Logan International Airport late last week was a conspiracy hatched by external affairs minister Salman Khurshid to defame him outside India. The detention — which according to some media reports was for about 10 minutes — ruffled a lot of feathers in the UP government. Reacting to it UP chief minister Akilesh Yadav cancelled his talk at Harvard University and also chose to skip a reception hosted by the Indian consul general at New York. Thus what should have been a routine security check has been blow out of proportion and the Samajwadi Party is chasing a phantom of its own imagination. Anyone who has travelled to the United States, Europe or even Israel will list out the inconvenient, and at times unpleasant, experiences of security checks one has to go through at the airports there. One cannot overlook the positives of being extra cautious, especially at times when the organisations and people with bad intentions are getting innovative by the day.
Azam Khan is missing the woods for the trees in his charge that he was singled out because he was a member of a particular religious community and was thus unfairly targeted. Security checks, irrespective of race, religion, etc, are norms different countries adopt to ensure safety of its citizens. The UP minister is not the first person to be ‘humiliated’ in such a scenario. Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan and former Union minister George Fernadez was also subject to such security checks. Most notably, former president APJ Abdul Kalam was frisked at JFK airport in 2011. While Kalam played down the incident and was not irked about it, the leader from UP is in no mood see reason. Given that the Azam Khan incident — if at all a routine security measure can be called so — comes a few days after the Boston marathon bombings, one cannot find fault with the airport authorities if they were a wee bit extra cautious in their duty.
Winston Churchill, former British prime minister, had a point while saying “The price of greatness is responsibility” and responsibility, it seems, is a trait wanting in many of our netas. What seems to have been hurt in this process is the fragile ego of our leaders. Much used to having all doors being open and royal treatment being meted out — often to the discomfort of others —politicians find it below their standing to follow the rules. Such an attitude might pass off in India but there is no point in getting miffed when asked to comply by the laws when abroad. One would have thought that such measures would dawn upon our leaders the realisation that when it comes to security, no one is above the law. Is it too much to ask from our politicians?
(An edited version of this appeared in the Hindustan Times on April 30)