‘Shashi Tharoor, loyal courtier at the durbar, a burqa is simply a veil !’

No need to get excited Mr. Tharoor. A burqa simply means a veil. BTW, your reference to burqa versus shorts (your not so burqa reference to the shorts that the Rashtriya Swayam Sangh cadres wear) is not quite accurate. Shorts are excellent in a tropical country like India and it makes sense not to sweat it out in pants etc. as you seem to suggest that Indians do.

Shashi Tharoor, as usual betrays his class prejudice against Narendra Modi who used the word ‘burqa’ to describe the veil that the Congress has drawn over its corruption and misgovernance. Yaswant Sinha has rightly pointed out that no matter what Modi says the Congress and its chamchas will pick up a few words and run with them in order to fool the Indian public.

Shri Modi has been talking relentlessly (and will continue to do so) about the worst government that independent India has had since Independence.

To return to our Shashi. The clothing analogy got under his skin, he said in an interview to one of the national television channels. He would, one assumes, have preferred for Shri Modi to use an Anglicised word like ‘ veil ‘ rather than the indigenous word ‘burqa’ (Modi was speaking in Hindi). But to conceal his class bias against someone who comes from the backward caste and does not speak in acquired Queen’s English (which Tharoor has assiduously cultivated over the years) Tharoor misleads the public by talking about the communalism of the Rashtriya Swayam Sangh (RSS).

One should remind Mr. Tharoor, that RSS cadre not only wear shorts (as indeed they should in a tropical country, unlike the sweaty pants that are worn at the Delhi durbar) they also carry sticks. No less a personage than Mahatma Gandhi had exhorted Indians to carry sticks and get out under the sunshine and do some exercises (which the RSS cadre do !). RSS cadres do not sit in air conditioned offices and belt it out as Tharoor does, belt out the inanities that he speaks in his fake English accent ! And they are present at every national disaster, floods,earthquakes etc. to help the people of the country. They wear shorts.

Among the inanities he has recently been pedalling is that the Congress Party had instituted secularism as some large umbrella like humanitarian concept. In fact, they initiated the worst form of divisive politics by institutionalising minorities with their absence of a Uniform Civil Code. Dr. Ambedkar had warned against this. They worked assiduously to keep the Hindu majority in a permanent animated suspension by meddling in their religious institutions (the temples) and allowing the minority communities a free hand in running their centres of worship.

This was simply vote bank politics from the time of Jawaharlal onwards, and it is only now that the Muslims of India have realised that they have been taken for a ride.

Everything the Congress touched was tainted by these short sighted policies that further distanced the very minorities themselves and prevented them from being integrated into the body politic. The Shah Bano episode was only one of their crassest blunders. It set back the rights of women in the Muslim community.

As for Tharoor’s pompous statement that Maulana Azad had argued for an undivided India since the Muslims were also part of this country, it was Savarkar who had said in the 1920s that the minorities will be full fledged citizens of the country once it is independent. And Savarkar it must be noted was speaking at the time of the worst excesses of communalism in the country.

It is time that not only the BJP but ordinary citizens of India questioned the half baked accounts presented by the Congress and its hangers on. Tharoor may only be a foot soldier in their larger agenda of divide and rule, neverthless he too should be called.

(The writer is a Political Philosopher who taught at a Canadian university).

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