“Kuch ladkiyon ki bhi galti hoti hai. Dosti karne se pehle unko sochna chahiye.”
This little homily — loosely translated as “Girls are at fault, too. They should think (of consequences) before befriending boys” — would be bad enough coming from the usual male chauvinist chaddiwala. But it comes from Sheila Chaturvedi, a respectable, sari-clad woman, a member of the Uttar Pradesh State Commission for Women, no less. What makes it far, far worse is that these comments came as a response to the murder of a 19-year-old girl in Lucknow; a murder so gruesome that it made hardened cops throw up (the girl was cut into pieces with a motorised chopper while still alive).
On the face of it, this bit of utter insensitivity may have nothing to do with the AIB Knockout show (also known as the AIB Roast), or the closing down of the Urdu paper Awadhnama, but it does. The common links are a skewed sense of priority, an outmoded value system and a propensity to catch the hunted and not the hunter. About the horrible case of the Lucknow girl there is nothing to say except to ask the likes of Ms Chaturvedi how they went about choosing their friends — or did they not have any, so there was no question of screening out possible hacksaw murderers?
Actually, there is a lot to be said about the attitude displayed by someone who is a member of a state commission for women. To start with, what would the women’s commission do? Ask girls not to talk to boys at all? Or, to be super safe, stay wrapped put in purdah? We might as well be the Taliban then, always blaming the woman, always asking girls to be careful and chaste and covered and not provoke men’s lust. No man is ever held accountable for his inability to control his sexual, criminal urges.
As for Awadhnama, the Urdu paper, what did it do? It carried a story on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, using the cover of its latest issue as an illustration. Let it be noted that Awadhnama did not carry a cartoon, which mocked Islam or the Prophet — it just carried a photograph of the magazine cover. Nevertheless, all hell broke loose and the Urdu paper had to shut down. Its employees were left jobless while its editor — by all accounts a highly respected journalist — is on the run because she is threatened, as is her family (her children had to go into hiding and miss school).
Given this situation, what do Mumbai’s supercops do? They arrest Shireen Dalvi, the paper’s editor, and issue warrants to the newspaper’s vendors! Our supercops do absolutely nothing about the people or organisations that issue threats to the editor and force the closing down of a paper. And what’s the logic behind arresting the vendors? The vendors can read Urdu, the supercops said, so they shouldn’t have sold the newspaper. That implies, of course, that newspaper hawkers henceforth, must read every daily/magazine they sell, and having read the paper, act as censors.
Mumbai’s supercops, by the way, have not even offered Ms Dalvi or her family any protection. Since the Mumbai supercops’ modus operandi is now clear, the question to ask them is this: Why are you stopping at only the editor and the vendors? Why not arrest all the workers at the printing press? And the paper’s readers — why not arrest all the readers, too?
The AIB Roast is a joke in itself. If you are Rip Van Winkle, here’s a little background — AIB is a group of stand-up comics who tell jokes, which are sometimes funny. A “Roast” is something of a tradition in schools, colleges and other institutions where you crack jokes about prominent people of that institution in their presence. Some of the jokes can be pretty wild, and some can be quite wicked, but they are all supposed to be taken in good humor and no one is expected to take offence.
The Roast in question involved prominent Bollywood names like Ranveer Singh, Arjun Kapoor and Karan Johar. Apparently, the last named was the object of maximum roasting. His reaction? He laughed. Everyone who was “roasted” took it in the spirit of fun. The audience (which had bought tickets and were warned what to expect, raunchy, I believe is the word) enjoyed it too. When an edited version was put on YouTube, with warnings and disclaimers about age and content, it garnered 8 million views, with the “likes” outnumbering the “dislikes” 10 to 1.
So what’s the problem? The rest of the universe, or at least that part which lives in super moralistic India, went on a virtual rampage. Even people like Ashoke Pandit, an activist much respected for his relentless fight for the cause of Kashmiri pundits, turned into a disapproving censor (because he is now on the Censor Board which, incidentally, is neither here nor there in this case). To date, the following have got their hackles suitably ramped up against the show: RPI activists, NCP workers, Mumbai Police (their morals being the most upright) and now even the Federation of Western India Cine Employees, a body supposed to look after the interests of cine workers — which, in English or any recognised language, means several Ws such as welfare, wages, working conditions, working hours etc, but does not, in English or any other language, involve protecting another “W” (wicked thoughts).
Closing questions: Did Ms Chaturvedi deplore men with mechanised hacksaws? Did Mumbai’s super cops round up the men issuing threats? Did anyone censure the Republican Party of India, the Nationalist Congress Party, the police and the Federation of Western India Cine Employees for the crime of not possessing a sense of humour? Of course not. It’s a question of priorities, you see.
The writer is a senior journalist
