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The Saaransh of Anupam Kher's exit

The Saaransh of Anupam Kher's exit

Author: Tavleen Singh
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: October 17, 2004
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/archive_full_story.php?content_id=57090

Introduction: Foreign advisors to the Planning Commission in Delhi are anti-India and anti-people but foreign advisors to the West Bengal Government are pro-people. FDI is a threat to India's sovereignty at barely $5 billion a year but no threat at nearly $50 billion to China's sovereignty and foreigners wanting to invest in West Bengal are more than welcome. All of this is such rubbish that the Prime Minister should stand up to the Comrades and expose their hypocrisies. Instead, when they get really aggressive he invites them to breakfast.

This week's column has an unlikely hero. Anupam Kher. As the latest victim of ''detoxification'', he was sacked from the Censor Board last week but decided not to go gently. He called a press conference to speak out against the Marxian machinations of Comrade Harkishen Singh Surjeet whom he charged with being the man behind his dismissal. He was considering legal action against said Comrade, he added, because he had called him an RSS man and as someone who did not subscribe to any political ideology he saw this as calumny. Before any of the hacks could ask what was so alluring about the Censor Board that he should not leave quietly, he said he was doing well as an actor and did not need the Censor Board job but believed it was ''time to take a stand''. When he said this I wanted to reach into the TV screen and shake him by the hand.

At last someone has dared say what we should have been saying months ago. It is time to take a stand against Comrades Surjeet, Basu, Yechury, Dasgupta, et al. Time to denounce them for the bunch of hypocrites they are. With starvation deaths reported (in this newspaper) from West Bengal, India's longest ruled Marxist State, who are these Comrades to speak for the ''people''? Who are they to speak for anyone? Yet, not a day goes by when they do not have some new rap on the knuckles to administer to the Sonia-Manmohan coalition.

Admitted that the government survives on Marxist life support but if the Marxists are ''outside supporters'' then they need to stop behaving as if it is they who are in government and the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi their factotums. Uncertainty over who really rules us is already an internal affliction of this government with not even Cabinet ministers being sure. So, when the Home Minister thinks, as he did last week, that he is about to lose his job he runs off to plead with Sonia and not the Prime Minister. When ministers are unsure of policy matters they do the same, which makes governance much more complicated than it already is, so if the Marxists want the government to survive they must stop acting as if they were trying to pull it down.

Unless this is what they are secretly trying to do. Do not be fooled by the aged appearance and white hair of our Comrades, at heart they remain youthful revolutionaries and could be using the piggy-back to power in Delhi to try and demolish the bourgeois State from the inside. It's been so long since I paid attention to Leftist talk that I only half remember the jargon and the plotting from a time in the early seventies when I hung about on the edges of a group of hardcore Lefties. There were Marxists and quasi-Marxists, naxalities, ex- naxalites and JNU political theorists and we would gather on the badly-lit terrace of a barsati in Nizamuddin, drink cheap liquor, smoke cheap cigarettes and talk revolution. As a wide-eyed, bourgeois, enemy of the people I was never fully included in the plans but remember hearing much about the destruction of the bourgeois State from the inside.

Then, of course, all plans for international revolution went awry with the worldwide collapse of Marxist States but somehow the changes in Europe and China escaped Indian Marxists. With the extreme vanity of those who believe they are always right, they lecture the Sonia-Manmohan government daily on what they call anti-people policies. But, look even casually at the things they have made such a fuss about and you will spot the insincerity and the cant. So foreign advisors to the Planning Commission in Delhi are anti-India and anti-people but foreign advisors to the West Bengal Government are pro-people. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is a threat to India's sovereignty at barely $5 billion a year but no threat at nearly $50 billion to China's sovereignty and foreigners wanting to invest in West Bengal are more than welcome. All of this is such rubbish that the Prime Minister should stand up to the Comrades and expose their hypocrisies and their false pieties. Instead, when they get really aggressive he invites them to breakfast. We see them totter happily off in their ill-fitting ''people's clothes'' and we see them totter out looking happy and well-fed and then a day later comes another salvo.

The bourgeois State may still be safe from demolition from the inside but the Congress Party was infiltrated long ago by the Comrades and their defunct ideology. So, it is hard to say whether the government's ''detoxification'' drive was Marxist instigated or not but it certainly has Marxist support. Again, please observe the shameless hypocrisy. It's alright for West Bengal to ensure that public servants, teachers, sarpanches, historians, economists and virtually everyone else connected with government is Marxist but if the RSS tries to do the same thing it becomes wrong. Will someone explain to me why?

This does not mean that I believe Anupam Kher is an RSS man. I am sure he tells the truth when he says he is not but even if he was an RSS man his dismissal would be wrong. The ''detoxification'' drive is a dangerously bad idea because if it becomes an exercise every new government wastes time on where will it stop? It would be far more worthwhile to get government out of the business of writing history books and censoring films but the Comrades would never support such a move. In the end its not about the ''people'' but about power, and with this government they have too much power without any responsibility. It really is time for Sonia Gandhi or the Prime Minister to take a stand.

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com
 


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