Politicians in Uttar Pradesh are clearly guilty of carrying their bitterness over a security check slight in America a little too far. What a Harvard lecture by Akhilesh Yadav on the successful organisation of the Kumbh Mela, the world’s greatest gathering of humans at one place, had to do with Azam Khan’s brief detention by paranoid airport security screeners in the US is beyond anyone’s comprehension.
Far from scoring a political point, SP leaders may only have managed to invite ridicule upon themselves, particularly as Azam Khan also tried to blame external affairs minister Salman Khurshid for hatching a “conspiracy” to humiliate his party. How US airport security would act at the behest of an Indian minister can only be explained in the devious thought processes of our politicians. All these UP netas have done is display their immaturity.
It’s another matter that the US is notorious for security procedures often driven by racial and religious profiling. But Indians will do well to remember that as visitors we are subject to that country’s laws, which apply to all, and don’t make embarrassing exceptions to security procedures of the kind seen in the long list displayed at airport screening areas in democratic India.