Threat, intimidation and inimicality. These words aptly sum up the behaviour of those hecklers who infringe upon the rights of freedom and speech of their targets. But what if there is a role reversal and the Left-leaners are on the receiving side?
Bengaluru: The latest way of disagreeing with those who have nationalist thoughts, question the hypocrisy of Left liberals and expose the double standards of the Congress and its coterie is to heckle them while they are in airports or airplanes.
While the entire world is yet to come to terms with what happened to Arnab Goswami on IndiGo and GoAir, another rightist Mahesh Vikeram Hegde was prevailed upon at the Mangaluru airport.
Though these Left-leaning women verbally attacked him and threw all norms of decency to the winds, Mahesh maintained his poise, as expected.
Now, for a moment, let’s reverse the situation.
Let’s assume that the right-leaning intellectuals attacked, say a Kunal Kamra or a Shashi Tharoor or a Rajdeep Sardesai for their love to lean to the Left.
How would the situation have been?
By now, every champion of free speech, public etiquette would have screamed at the top of their voices, with intolerance and intimidation underlining their protests.
And, let’s not forget! Pseudos like Prashant Bhushan who knock on the doors of the Supreme Court in the dead of night, would have again taken recourse to judiciary. They would have filed cases under all sections of the rulebook and worked overnight to somehow, arraign PM Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah too.
And the Rana Ayyubs, Rajdeeps, Sagarikas would have written polemics in papers like Washington Post, employing every cell in their body to portray that India has become a haven of right-wing rowdyism.
And after all these, how can we forget the protests? Just like anti-CAA and anti-NRC protests, you could see them line up in serpentine queues, and then, correlate the attackers with Hindutva and chant anti-India and anti-Hindu slogans.
But as they say every cloud has a silver lining. They would voluntarily sing Vande Mataram and Jana Gana Mana.
Yet the whole world would know who the real culprits are!
Last Updated Jan 31, 2020, 4:58 PM IST