Why should intellectuals like Tarun Vijay exercise their grey matter over Syria, when they're more comfortable seeing the world in black and white?
Former MP Tarun Vijay made offensive remarks about South Indians upon being asked about racism in India on a news channel on Friday. He later apologised for them on Twitter, terming them as a 'badly framed sentence'. Pic/AFP
A great thing about the BJP being in power is that it sends its best and brightest to defend India at international fora, and this includes Tarun Vijay, a man who takes the "think" out of think-tank. We met more than 25 years ago, when we had the good fortune of bunking together while in Gujarat to report on former party president LK Advani's visit to the Somnath temple.
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I woke up one night to find Tarun Vijay sitting around with the lights on; he claimed he did not sleep much. I did not investigate his insomniac eccentricities and went back to sleep. One afternoon while we were driven through Gujarat, he listened to a cassette-playing walkman, and when I put on the headphones I could not figure out what was playing. "What kind of person are you?" he chided me. "You don't recognise Tulsidas's Ramayana?" Ah, yes. Silly me.
Later in the 1990s, a Chinese dignitary visited India during IK Gujral's prime ministership, and during the press conference, Tarun Vijay, the eminent editor of the RSS journal Panchajanya, asked a question. I wondered: Would it be about the boundary dispute? Would it be about the Dalai Lama? Would it be about Pakistan? "When will you allow Indian pilgrims at the Mansarovar Lake?" the eminent editor asked. The Chinese curtly replied that Mansarovar was already open for pilgrimage. India's External Affairs spokesperson rolled his eyes. Till recently, the same Tarun Vijay was a member of the Parliament's Consultative Committee on External Affairs.
In the Al Jazeera TV clip where Tarun Vijay was asked about racism in India, he first got aggressive with the host, in a bullying tactic typical of BJP's geniuses. "Are you Indian? Are you American? Where's your culture?" he shrieked. (The host magically produced his Indian passport from his jacket, to my abiding awe.) And then he said, essentially: some of my best friends are black. Good show. Besides showing up the false equivalences and the whataboutery of BJP debaters, he also once again revealed the deep racism of Indians - as if attacks on northeasterners and Africans weren't enough. And before South Indians get puffed up or act victimised, the fact is that they are equally racist.
Former Tamil Nadu chief minister MG Ramachandran had a skin condition and hence benefited from his voters' light-skinned preferences. I benefited from others' racism during my four years in Chennai. (Many people throughout my life, including close friends, have told me that I don't look like a Bihari. What a compliment.) I have seen a Hyderabadi make a face while talking about Chennaiites. Indians love a hierarchy, and they love it so much they have institutionalised it in the form of caste. Race is just an aspect of that.
It is thus refreshing to hear Tarun Vijay's candour about the greatness of Indians. At least he did not speak about Kashmir, where his party is doing its best to defeat a fair-skinned man named Farooq Abdullah, in the Srinagar parliamentary by-poll. Dr Farooq is so fair-skinned he makes the BJP thin-skinned. He is one Muslim they don't want in Parliament - an experienced politician who has seen a lot of Indian history and may raise one uncomfortable question after another of our Great Leader Kim Jong Modi.
Dr Farooq has no choice, given the Congress leadership's dereliction of duty. Fortunately for the ruling PDP-BJP state government, three youngsters were shot dead in Chadoora ten days ago, and this will drive down voter turnout in the by-poll. Then Modi and company can stick to not talking to Pakistan or the separatists and Tarun Vijay can keep pontificating about how Kashmir is a land dispute and not a people's grievance. I hope Dr Farooq wins. Now more than ever, India needs him.
I was sorry, however, to not hear Tarun Vijay talk about Syria. Since he was on the parliamentary committee for external affairs, I wonder what his position is on India's position on the situation in Syria. Obviously, he will blindly support his party's confusion - do we support the Russians who support Bashar al-Assad, even though he occasionally uses nerve gas to kill rebels and their children, or do we support the American fight against the Islamic State, which is not only against Assad but also against the Free Syria Army and other rebels?
Given his question 20 years ago to the Chinese about Mansarovar Lake, I don't have much expectation that he will formulate a half-intelligible probe. After all, since Assad's violent repression of the peaceful 2011 Arab Spring protests in Damascus, the situation has gotten murkier and murkier.
Why should an intellectual like Tarun Vijay and his fellow travellers exercise their grey matter over an issue with so many shades of grey, when they are more comfortable seeing the world in black and white?
Aditya Sinha's crime novel, The CEO Who Lost His Head, is available now. He tweets @autumnshade
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