Mind your language
The language of public discourse is getting rather coarse. Union steel minister Beni Prasad Verma has simply added another episode to this soap opera of Indian politics in which politicos take pot-shots at each other in the public domain and then come up with an apology of sorts when the heat from their own party becomes unbearable.
Whether it is the chief minister of West Bengal making disparaging remarks about all and sundry when she is scooting around Kolkata on official assignments with television cameras in tow or Union or state ministers having a go at opponents, the common thread is the low quality of debate. The stench of invective permeates the air and the signs are things can only get worse.
India is an ancient land in which aesthetics, or rasas, was a subject even in historical texts like Bharata’s Natya Shastra, believed to have been written almost 200 years before the Julian calendar. It’s a pity that a land that knew the value of Pi and charted astronomy eons before other civilisations has been reduced to a state in which its leaders cannot even keep the language of public debate clean.
So vitiated has the atmosphere of public life become that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was recently heard rebuking Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley on the subject of public criticism. With elections just about a year away at the latest, maybe it’s time for an all-party meeting to spell out the rules of debate.
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