I guess most of us idolize someone or the other. Men / women who have done something great
in their field to deserve our respect. We attribute values to them & think of them as infallible, unlike normal humans. Till one day, to your surprise and astonishment, they come crashing down. Usually for something that you never thought they would succumb to. And that is what happened to me a few weeks ago.
I knew her through the pages of newspapers & magazines when I was growing up. Then, she didn't have much to her credit other than being cute & being wedded into a famous family in
India. Actually, make that a real famous family. But did I mention she was cute ? To a kid in
his teens, that is more important an attribute in someone than even grabbing a Nobel prize.
She was cute. Actually, I still find her cute, even though she is today a lady in her late forties
or even early fifties. But then is there a rule that says cuteness has to vanish with age ? Over time, she also gained my sympathy because she was unfortunately widowed at a very young
age. And if that wasn't enough to garner sympathy, she was thrown out of the family by her mom-in-law. Pretty surprising because the mom-in-law doted on that particular son.
A couple of years later tragedy strikes the family again - the mom-in-law is assasinated by
her bodyguards. If by now, you did not guess who I am talking about, then you are either
one of my non-Indian friends/readers or you seriously need to update yourself. The lady in question is Maneka Gandhi, wife of Late Sanjay Gandhi and mother of VarunGandhi who is
in the news currently for quite the wrong reasons.
Anyway, coming back to our lady, she raises her only son by herself and makes a mark as
a vocal animal rights activist. While not really an animal lover (am a non-vegetarian), I did
admire the effort she took for the sake of animals. And I would be wrong if I said that I did
not get swayed at least a wee bit by her exhortations. It helped that I found her cute. :-)
And then she came crashing down. Down the high perch where I had kept her. Beneath all
that talk and advice (and ofcourse cuteness), I realised lay a heart that was as human as the next-door Indian politician. Her fall was not caused by greed for money or sleaze, but for something that is the bane of many a politician in India. She fell in my eyes because of her
blind love for her son.
Love so blind that it threw rational thinking to the wind and made her ignore the damage
her son was causing with his words. Her son Varun started off as a poet and recently has
been active in politics for a few years now. He opted for the extremely right-wing Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), which is in total contrast to the political leaning of his Dad's family, who
have always been associated with the Congress party.
The BJP put him up as the candidate for the Philibit constituency in the state of UttarPradesh and during an election rally there, he made a speech in which he used threats against Muslims and Sikhs. Given the BJP's mostly anti-Muslim leanings, I can understand his verbal assault
on them, but I could not understand why he targetted Sikhs in his speech. For one, his Mom
is a Sikh herself and secondly the BJP has an alliance with a Sikh party (Akali Dal) in Punjab.
I am glad that the Election Commision intervened along with the legal machinery and put him behind bars. Guys like him who don't hesitate to break the social fabric of the country just to
get some votes need to be put away. And when finally granting him bail, the courts made it
clear that he is not supposed to say anything that could incite communal tension. And now
that he found that life in prison is not entirely fun, he has no idea of going back there again
and thus is keeping his big mouth shut.
Meanwhile Momma dearest was all over the news crying about the 'injustice' meted out to
her son by having him thrown in prison. It did not matter to her that there are so many
wastrels roaming our country who would literally take her son's words for a call-to-action
and go about snuffing out innocent lives just because they pray to a different God.
Not cute at all, madam. The next time you are going to sermonise us on how stray dogs
should not be eliminated or how cruel the procedures in our slaughter-houses are, I would suggest you rather keep an eye on what your son is upto or else we might end up loosing something more valuable - human lives.
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