The strange insignificance of the Parliament breach
I am trying to understand why I am unable to accord any importance to the incident in Parliament on 13 December. In theory, two people jumping off the visitor’s gallery into the chamber while the House is in session and releasing a yellow gas should be a serious event, but I am unable to take it seriously. Nor do you, I suspect.
It is not only the sort of people who read this newspaper who might be unaffected, but from what I gather, most Indians. The intruders said they were protesting their unemployment and I believe that is all there is to it. The incident, of course, is “a serious breach in security," but nothing else about it is serious.
One newspaper report said that the incident “shocked" the nation and I am baffled by the word. The nation was far from “shocked." Not because it is a common occurrence, which it is not. But because it was oddly insignificant.
In fact, as the news media keeps referring to one man as “the mastermind" of the incident, all I can think of is that ‘mastermind’ is an excessive word to describe the ring leader of some unemployed activists. For most of India, a reason why the incident did not have any gravity is that none of the people involved had a Muslim name. If the intruders were Muslim, the nation would have gone crazy for a few days.
In any case, in the new India, no sane Muslim is likely to protest unemployment in that manner. Had it happened, at least one TV channel would have explained how he was trained by Lashkar-e-something in Pakistan. Without that connection, the incident was just a lame “andolanjeevi" protest.
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