By Aysha Munawwarah
Pragya Singh Thakur, one of the main accused for the Maharashtra Malegoan bomb blast is now contesting for MP in Bhopal. Whether the general public is pleased with this news or not,let’s keep it aside-for now. What we need to look into is How the media is portraying this.On Sunday (28 april 2019), in one of it’s columns, the Hindu posted an article on “Why should terrorists not be MPs?”
Here’s the summary-
The editor starts with congratulating the audience for allowing a terror-accused to contest the elections; and curses those who don’t. He justifies that those who opposed her are merely ‘jealous’ that they couldn’t be as prominent as she is.
He says Pragya entering politics should be lauded not attacked because
- Despite the long struggle to allot 33% reservation for women in parliament (which never happened) she managed to contest.
- When rape-accused and murder-accused enter politics, why not her?
But she’s a criminal! Woman or otherwise, we don’t want terrorists ruling us!
Just because there are politicians with criminal records does’nt mean we welcome anyone from that lot. Wrong is wrong, be it a man, woman, trans, anyone per say.
But our editor here, calls this hypocrisy cum patriarchy.
So far the article went fine. Until he told this-
The Modi government has been the most aggresive in fighting terrorism.
Um.. Excuse me? Dividing Indians based on religion and ‘what meat they eat’ is aggressive, but definitely not most aggressive in fighting terrorism.
Wait for the main part..
The best way to combat indiscipline (implying that terrorism is a form of indiscipline) is to make the bully the class monitor
Boss, if you make someone with ‘hands-on’ experience on terrorism as your MP, you don’t need Pakistan or China to bomb our country. Your MP Miss Pragya is more than enough to bomb your brains out.
Your principles of ‘making the bully the class monitor’ will only work if our bully realises his mistake. Meanwhile in Bhopal, we see Pragya jii saying it’s the cow’s urine that cured her cancer.
The article ends with a list of peace prizes awarded from various countries. He says by making terrorists as MPs, we can ‘single-handedly eradicate terrorism from this planet’.
Somebody please hire him to script a space movie that we all know will never happen in future.
And now, the conclusion,
Here’s a piece of evidence ladies and gentlemen, an evidence which shows how media is tuning our minds to support the wrong ones, and to despise the wronged.
India wants leaders, both men and women who rule the country without any bias on gender, caste, and religion. India wants empowered women who could change the fate of India, not women and men who are crime-accused.
A sin cannot be looked as a feature if it’s committed by a woman. A bomb is still a bomb if he detonates it or she detonates it. If she detonates it, it’ll still kill hundreds. Does that mean she can rule us?
Aysha Madam, first of all let’s congratulate you that you write very well!
Second is this Hindu editorial most likely used dark humour/ subtle sarcasm/ like a comedy meme–to highlight how absurd this step of Modi is and shows desperation of hate-politics bearing poetic justice..
Very few people understand this dark humour which is actually very effective and we need to learn it for our community!
Nevertheless, very good analysis and we always keep improving from cradle to the grave. Well done providing food for thought…