NSUI goons? Why do this to yourself, Congress - Theek Hai?

Babita Basu
24 December 2012, 03:58 PM IST

So, the protests in Delhi turned violent and invoked counter-violence from the police. The crowd turned nasty in its anger. Some believe it, while others don't. Most people don't, if you go by what the Twitterverse is saying.

So what happened? Some protestors, posing to be representative of a cross-section of the crowd, apparently, met Sonia and Rahul at around 11.30pm on Sunday, and were assured of swift action and suitable deterrents vis-a-vis gender crimes in the country (see here). But the story runs differently on Twitterverse. Tweeple think that it were the Congress' own NSUI members who mingled with the protestors and were singled out to meet Sonia in a sham gesture of placating the protestors. On the other hand, NSUI's 'goons'and/or other rowdies were slowly and quietly infused in the group of students at the peaceful protest at India Gate and Raisina Hill who instigated/unleashed violence and arson, making the protests fall on its face and invoking police action in the form of lathicharges, tear-gas shelling and water-cannoning, in the government's desperate efforts to put down the wave of protests that are now rocking the very foundations of the government. Trapped and beaten, many students and women went home broken and brow-beaten by the system, according to this version which may be uncannily real. While pictures of police aggression on the unarmed peaceful protestors appal civilised society, one wonders why (if this version is true) the government had to take a sly route to tarnish the image of the protest rather than make the best of a bad game by Sonia and Rahul sitting in with the protestors in a show of solidarity, either sham or real.

Talking about images, there's another little gaffe by our dear Home Minister made on TV this morning, talking to one of India's most popular news anchors. It's his view that the image of the government would have been sullied if it wasn't for the ruthless police action on the angry protestors. As though that wasn't weird enough, he went on to indicate that meeting the protestors would have been as much of a display of weakness on his part as meeting Maoists in procession. Mr Shinde, in effect, sullied the image of the Congress. While the idea of a clean government image had already become joke enough with scam figures running into lakhs of crores and nationwide uprisings against corruption, the government's total incompetence in handling the law and order situation in Delhi have made matters worse. The Lt Governor of Delhi has been holidaying merrily in the US, indifferent to a whole week of seething protests and has to be finally "called back" to Delhi when matters have become too hot to handle. The President is nowhere to be seen. The icing on the cake is when the honourable Prime Minister, addressing the nation and urging calm, finishes reading his stilted script and asks, Theek Hai?

Theek Nahin Hai, Pradhaan Mantriji. While the incidence of the Delhi protests did offer the Congress a pretty opportunity to capitalise on popular sentiment by sitting together in protest and solidarity, they got it all wrong by engineering a brutal clampdown, hurting girls and women whose protection and security are the need of the hour. The route that the Congress is taking is suicidal, banking on the assumption that public memory is short, and that all will be well by the time 2014 arrives, with a few sops to voters thrown in between. The Congress needs to be reminded of how it was routed post the Emergency in 1978, and that the people of India can remember and react, when the worst comes to the worst. Public memory is often short, I admit, with our fatalism and tolerance levels and a tendency to fall into a political rut. But look beyond it. India is changing. If you fail to notice it now, you would for sure, in 2014. Wait until then.