Rising Intolerance!

Those readers blessed with elephantine memory and tremendous power of recall may just manage to remember that recently, all of three months back, there was a raging controversy in India about the country having suddenly become very intolerant.  If they wonder how and why the hue and cry dissipated as quickly as it emerged, probably there lies part of the solution to the puzzle.  There was no spectacular effort from any quarter to effectively douse the fire, but still doused it was - one does not hear newspaper headlines and TV channels scream the stuff at you non-stop.  There was an election around the corner and various political satraps and their bands of excitable followers found it convenient and profitable to keep the pot boiling with all kinds of theories to keep their own vested interests going.  One was reminded of the witches in ancient tales, avidly stirring the inevitable bubbling potion in a cauldron, symbolic of cooking up something nasty.

Accusations of the government of the day abetting growing intolerance flew thick and fast, with opposition parties waking up with new instances of intolerance every dawn.  While the government made noises and tried to ward off the aggressive pitch of opponents, unfortunately the surfeit of  moronic elements on its side just fermented the broth further, virtually unchecked.  Such elements should have been permitted to open their mouth occasionally, only to imbibe something for sustenance -- while this scribe is saying this out of political correctness, he is yet to be convinced that even this allowance is necessary. That too only if long term intravenous feeding was declared unsustainable for huge numbers, for justifiable reasons like endless cost of catheters and medical supervision!  This illustrious group had an open field for a while and contrived to exacerbate the situation effortlessly until the government got burnt by a surprisingly stinging blow-back in the said election and decided to clamp down, obviously too late after heavy damage was done. All these divisive elements have since been probably herded into well-fortified subsistence quarters in the nether regions and given enormous license to bawl out as they please, on the condition that  no one else is around to pay heed.  Last heard, these people are hugely enjoying their new-found `power'.

Into this prickly and significantly politicized debate, waded a small section of the intelligentsia and a bunch of well-meaning, smart individuals.  Each one had his or her own edge of angst and agenda and the witches' repugnant concoction in the cauldron quickly got rancid and acidic.  Dozens of authors of various hues took umbrage and condescended to return awards they had received up to a decade or more earlier, not from the government but from a literary body.  Nobody has explained well why this group  imagined that such a gesture would seriously highlight the disenchantment with the current government, especially when the awards were given in the past during the tenure of another.  So much for impact assessment, if any, done by that eminent group.  If they thought this would galvanize public opinion, one could fault their collective wisdom because the majority populace was blissfully unaware that these writers and awards even existed.  You cannot blame the callous public, because these awardees dwelt in an esoteric domain, far removed from the popularly recognized movie and TV awards our men and women usually thrive on!  So all that happened was the literary body sardonically whimpered that it is not in the same business as Amazon or Flipcart and these awards, once accepted, cannot be returned and there was no procedure to even receive the scrolls back!  This scribe's guess is that the scrolls were accepted by the authorities (because they preferred to avoid further courier expense in sending them back to folks who anyway resented the awards) and might be reused in future in some way.  The avalanche of public protests the authors hoped to instigate ended with some eighty authors (out of 1.3 billion people in the country) forming a close-knit rebel band, with a sprinkling of support elsewhere, no doubt.  That these authors were castigated by others as representing a motivated anti-government platform, with an ulterior political agenda was to be expected.

Enter Amir Khan, with an uncharacteristically shambolic confession that his wife was worried about bringing up their child in such a vitiated atmosphere and was wondering whether they should move abroad.  For someone who has always been seen as intelligent and balanced, this was more than an error of judgement, considering the fact that if he shifted residence, he probably would never do even a TV commercial again in India.  He is not a mutt to throw the baby with the bath water.  Why, then, for god's sake, make that bloomer and take a bed-room conversation public in this context?   Apparently, a few days back, Amir has sheepishly and inevitably resorted to that amorphous weapon of shameless skulduggery usually employed by motor-mouthed politicians -- denial of his own statement by saying he was misquoted or some such banality, just to salvage vestiges of whatever! Though, Amir found huge resonance with the original statement closer home.  My dear wife asks me twice a year if we can move to USA, not because of rising intolerance, but because she loves the idea of proximity to our boys who live there.  As is her wont, she ignored my pointed query as to what she would do if they move to Africa or Argentina with their next jobs.  Forgive that digression.

Once all the frenetic breast-beating by aforesaid individuals, groups and the hyper loquacious TV news anchors subsided without any apparent change in the level of intolerance in one direction or the other -- which happened after the Bihar election --  a bemused lay-man was left with some basic, unanswered, troubling questions:

**Did all those who returned awards and held up an angry flag against rising intolerance have any statistical proof that things had gone amiss?  Yes, there were reports of a man being lynched for keeping mutton-masquerading-as-beef in his fridge, some cows looking for old-age homes for want of options, the usual rant about Ram Mandhir in Ayodhya etc.  But, as a common man, this scribe (it cannot get any more common than that!) did not encounter a single incident personally that made him feel that religious or social or gender intolerance had changed - whatever was there, was there always!!  This was confirmed by almost everyone who was asked this question.
** How does a small group of intelligentsia develop such an inflated opinion of its own power of persuasion to assume it could change history by protesting on its hind legs when the numbers were negligible and voices terribly feeble in the overall scheme of things?
**Why did the rebellion completely vanish the way it did - without a whimper and who did what to put a lid on that?

Having said all that, the same lay-man in me does appreciate a few signs of intolerance emerging in India:

**Cricket selectors getting intolerant of some old war horses because these keep stumbling too often.
** Prime Minister's intolerance of bombastic and obnoxious extreme right wingers in the party, who could, with mindless statements, undo months of serious and critical work.
** Bangalore residents' intolerance of the pathetic governance and maintenance activities of the City Corporation, when it comes to a bit of road among potholes, mounds of garbage and the like.

This whole episode helped this author to solemnly undertake that he will not return any award, if any was ever to be given to him even by mistake, for whatever reason and make an ass of himself.  But a personal pinnacle was reached when my dear wife's tolerance level snapped with a vendor who was outrageously leveraging his non-existent goodwill with me for a few years now, much to her chagrin and he was shown the door - one way for exiting.  Now, I am spared the weekly harangues for his repeated misdemeanours, from the most tolerant of individuals I have come across.  God bless her!!