Even after making a generous allowance for the fact that he is a politician, the utterances of Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb do not make sense. In fact, these are pure and simple nonsense. He is mistaken to believe that becoming chief minister gives him the license to hold forth on all and sundry subjects about which he seems to know next to nothing. Honestly, before he inflicts further damage on the party which in its wisdom made this nincompoop chief minister he should be asked to shut up. Yes, shut up. His own credibility is destroyed by his foolish statements. But, by association, he has spoiled his party’s image as well. A party which harbours backwoodsmen like Dev, who has no clue whatsoever about the past or the modern world is bound to come to grief sooner than later.
You might wonder why this relatively young chief minister of a small state has earned our ire but we believe that so utterly astounding have been some of his statements that every media consumer is already aware of them. Like he claimed that there was internet and television in the ancient times. The basis of his discovery were our widely read mythological sagas. He claimed that both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata duly established that India had made huge strides in science and technology. By way of proof, he said that “Sanjay while sitting in the palace with the blind king Dhritarashtra could describe in graphic detail the on-going battle… how could he have done it without there being internet, satellite communication, etc?” Indeed, if we were to trust the newly-minted chief minister of an Indian State, he would be well-advised to hire the best lawyers in the world and sue the global information technology giants for intellectual property rights violations and demand billions in damages and a share in their profits on a permanent basis.
But Dev was not done yet. Despite overnight becoming a butt of ridicule and contempt on the social media, he wouldn’t let go. This time he pontificated about the most suitable people to join civil services. “Only civil engineers should join civil services, no mechanical engineers”. Apparently, only civil engineers have the knowledge to “build up the society…” On Tuesday, came another gem in an unending series of inanities. Now, he threatened to pull out the finger nails of anyone who criticised his government or tried to interfere with its working. You can rest assured that more such inanities will flow from the mouth of Dev, given that he is only a couple of weeks old in his chief ministerial gaddi while he has full five years to entertain the country with his extraordinary beliefs and knowledge. Of course, he is not the only one in the BJP. The Gujarat Chief Minister, probably taking a cue from his Tripura counterpart, said that Narad was ahead of Google by a few millenniums. Again, a good case for suing Google for IPR theft and damages, isn’t it? Earlier, a junior minister at the Centre had stirred controversy by debunking the theory of evolution while another had sought to give credit for the invention of the flying machines to an Indian from his part of the country.
If the truth be told, the lack of exposure to proper education lies at the heart of the obscurantism that informs the worldview of a vast majority of the hardcore members of the Sangh parivar. Their motives and their determination to do good are beyond reproach, but it is their lack of grounding in modern thought, modern advancement in various fields of human endeavour which shows them up to be short of good sense and pragmatism. Their tendency to glorify an ancient past which nobody has seen brings them in direct conflict with a forward-looking worldview. The problem stems from their inhabiting a self-contained cocoon which does not allow outside influences to penetrate their closed minds. By constantly harping on apparently a golden past, when rivers of ‘ghee and milk ran in this holy land,’ the Sangh parivar members divest themselves of the responsibility to try and improve the lot of the poor and the underprivileged. However glorious the past, the people who have elected you to power seek a better present, a better future. They cannot feast on the past of Biplab Deb’s day-dreams. It is time he was told to keep his mouth shut and confine himself to the urgent task of governance in Tripura rather than making a splash in the national media by his foolish utterances.
