Viswanathan K's Thoughts

We continue to be a nation that takes offence at everything. And as usual, freedom of speech is what suffers. The latest instance is the decision to remove a cartoon of BR Ambedkar from all school books. The cartoon was drawn in 1949. It took our take-offence-at-everything brigade 63 years to take offence! And what was this cartoon that was so offensive? It shows Ambedkar sitting on a snail and holding a whip. The caption on the snail reads “Constitution”. Behind the snail stands Nehru holding another whip. Any normal person would interpret the cartoon as an indicator of the pace at which the constitution was being drafted. But not to the representatives of the downtrodden. They have now woken up and demanded that all NCERT books be purged of all such offensive material. And of course, the Congress government has caved in. Well done, Congress! A cartoon should be higher priority than, I don’t know, combating inflation or corruption or terrorism. In any case, suppressing freedom of ...

I thought that the Left had taken Bengal to rock bottom, that getting worse was not an option anymore: it was either up or sideways. But Mamata Bannerjee showed that down was still an option! She just got a Bengali professor arrested for forwarding a cartoon that made fun of her. Wow! The guy didn’t even draw the cartoon: he just did what most of us do, which is to forward something he liked or found interesting or amusing. And for that, it’s off to the dungeons in Mamata-land. The way the woman was getting in the way of every policy from the Center (the Teesta river pact with Bangaladesh, the Railway Budget, FDI in retail, the centralized counter terrorism proposal), I was beginning to think she had nothing in common with the UPA anymore. She just showed me what she shares with the UPA: she’s the same as Kapil Sibal and gang when it comes to censorship! I guess when Mamata saw Sibal’s attack on the Internet getting thrown out of the courts, one company at a time (first Microsoft, ...