|
Of a debate in
Press Club and a joke among Turks
WSN Bureau
NEW DELHI: This is
how many debates go in India, and even in many other parts of the
world, but the one at the Press Club in Delhi where Arundhati Roy
was among the audience, will still stand out for its shrillness,
rabidity and utter bankruptcy of argument, idea and ideology.
But first the joke
that it reminded of.
Ehud Olmert recently
said that more than anything else he was furious about the outburst
of joy in Gaza after the attack in Jerusalem, in which eight yeshiva
students were killed. This is what triggered the joke recall, an old
tale about a Jewish mother taking leave of her son, who has been
called up to serve in the Czar's army against the Turks.
"Don't exert
yourself too much," she admonishes him, "Kill a Turk and rest. Kill
another Turk and rest again…"
"But mother," he
exclaims, "What if the Turk kills me?"
"Kill you?" she
cries out, "Why? What have you done to him?"
Before that, last
weekend, the Israeli army killed 120 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,
half of them civilians, among them dozens of children. That was not
"kill a Turk and rest". That was "kill a hundred Turks and rest".
But Olmert does not understand.
It sometimes takes
just one seminar, one statement, one slip for the masks to come off.
On March 9, Sunday,
at the Delhi’s Press Club, the Urdu Press Club organized a debate on
"Fascism and Terrorism: Two Sides of the Same Coin". With an
India-Australia cricket match on, only about 50 people could muster
up the will to join the debate.
On the podium were panelists Surendra Jain of the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (VHP), historian Amaresh Misra, National Conference MP A R
Shaheen and Qaumi Party’s Mohammed Hasnain. Arundhati Roy too came
but only because she was not warned that there were going to be
politicians. She sat among the audience.
Amaresh Misra
addressed the predominantly Muslim audience first, blamed terrorism
in India on the growing Indo-Israel relationship and India’s
pro-West policies, lambasted the Sangh Parivar and the Congress-led
government for Muslim “persecution” across the country. Roy wanted
to leave but was offered the mike. She kept her speech on Muslim
persecution short. Perhaps the presence of VHP’s Surendra Jain and
journalist Manoj Raghuvanshi did not comfort her. Soon Raghuvanshi
was slamming “pseudo-secularists”, said he was the first journalist
in the world who, as a reporter for Newstrack in the late 1980s, had
reported the arrival of terrorism in Kashmir.
He also tried to
justify the Hindu backlash after the attacks on Akshardham and
Varanasi.
Raghuvanshi’s speech
made many in the crowd, mostly young college boys, restive. They
wanted him to change the tone of his speech. Unruffled, the
belligerent Raghuvanshi said, “You are 20 crore while Hindus number
80 crore. Imagine what will happen if the majority gets angry.”
Raghuvanshi then
dropped a bombshell when he asked clerics to remove the verses of
jihad from the Quran . This was a line straight from Hindutva’s hate
book. Soon Surendra Jain was screaming about "Rangeela Rasool", the
blasphemous Hindi book which describes the Prophet’s private life in
lurid detail.
The Muslim boys were
now on their feet. Many of them lunged towards Jain to thrash him.
Someone called the police.
"What have we said
that these people could possibly object to?" Raghuvanshi was asking
Jain.
Someone please tell
him the Turkish joke.
19
March 2008
|
Read Also