#ShameOnDigvijaya Comes A Tad Too Late

There are enough reasons to bash Digvijaya Singh. Calling Masarat Alam “sahab” is hardly one of them.

WrittenBy:Abhinandan Sekhri
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So Digvijaya Singh is caught in the cross hairs of Times Now and Twitter for adding a “sahab” while referring to Masarat Alam. Kind of harsh I’d say. But then I guess it is karma, considering he got off so lightly for most part of his life for things that deserved a bigger outrage.

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The problem with Digvijaya Singh is that he was mollycoddled in the glory days of the United Progressive Alliance by a very pliant and polite English media. NDTV especially had him over often for its drawing-room chit-chats that passed off as interviews.

There was this incident when an obviously petrified Sunil Kumar, posing as a journalist, without much of a thought-through plan, decided to not so much hurl a shoe but rather hold it while shivering and shitting bricks. The video that appeared on many channels is below.

This man stood there with his shoe in his hand next to the table where Manish Tewari and Janardan Dwivedi were holding a press conference. Tewari jumped and cowered as if he were being attacked by a horde of Attila’s Huns. Dwivedi, after the initial shock, recovered and in good Delhi “janta-hai-main-kaun-hun” style shoved the shoe-wielding dude around by which time eager to please Congress workers of Bapu’s party pounced on this solitary sod and started smashing him. All this you see in the video above.

This was around the same time Kiran Bedi had done her now-famous ghoonghat act on Anna’s stage during the Jan Lokpal movement for which she was given much grief.

There was much outrage about Bedi’s little act in the media, especially on NDTV that had Nidhi Razdan reacting as if the worst possible thing that could ever be done in public had been done. That display of histrionics for most channels was worthy of contempt, reprimand and admonishment reserved for the worst offenders. Now I’m not saying Bedi’s act was the best way to push for the Jan Lokpal bill, but consider this.

The man without a plan who decided to hold his shoe up and cower behind Dwivedi was roughed up by Congress workers, including “senior leader” Digvijaya Singh. Diggy Raja, like any good Delhi-ite, decided to jhado his haath also since everyone was beating this dude up. As they say: behti Ganga mein Diggy ne bhi haath dho liye.

It was the most despicable, cowardly and unleader-like thing to do in my opinion. One that it should be hard to recover from.

After this demonstration of his loyalty to the Congress, Digvijaya was as usual on NDTV, this time on Barkha Dutt’s show. She asked him if it was appropriate for a senior leader to get into a brawl. Good question, especially since over two dozen Congress workers were roughing up one fellow. Digvijaya Singh laughed and said something to the effect that he is also a grass-roots worker and has risen from ground up, so all this is ok. Thus justifying being part of what I would not call a brawl because 20 men against one is more like a lynch mob. Digvijaya’s action and response was giggled away and the conversation carried on. Make no mistake, had a person from a different background (read non-public school, royal, entitled) done the same, he would have been skewered by most English news channels. But for a very long time, different rules have applied to a different set.

Diggy’s indiscretion was joked away the way Khushwant Singh brushed away Sanjay Gandhi’s despicable actions as those of a lovable rogue. The fact is that if you belong (or belonged) to a social set of people who have appropriated “respectability” not for what they have done but because of a past of entitlement, power, politics and language, you would be treated differently than if you were a nobody from nowhere. That is changing and it is also true that past aristocracies are getting nervous with this shift in the power dynamic (although I have serious issues with the crazed bhakt brigade too).

Many leaders of the Congress party have indulged in the most low-grade activities and actions in the past that were glossed over by a friendly English news media because it was always from “one of us” (the PLU syndrome). There are enough reasons to bash Digvijaya Singh but calling Osama Bin Laden “ji” or Masarat Alam “sahab” is hardly one of them.

[Disclosure: The writer was a volunteer in India Against Corruption movement and was part of Jan Lokpal movement and dharna]

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