Opinion: Storms over hugs reflect our immaturity

For the last few years we have witnessed the rise of hate speech, intolerance towards dissentand vilification of opponents. Unfortunately, political parties and their spokespersons have spearheaded this trend in public discourse.

But it seems the rot is going to get worse. The media storms and scrutiny that followed Rahul Gandhi hugging the Prime Minister, and more recently when Navjot Singh ‘Sidhu’ attended Imran Khan’s swearing-in as the Prime Minister of Pakistan tell us how juvenile our politics has become.

After Rahul’s hug, some politicians had made misogynistic and insensitive comments that betrayed their own toxic prudishness. Some of them had even said, ‘that their wives will not be happy if they hug Rahul Gandhi as he is not a married man’.

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To some extent Rahul had diluted the effect of his own move and trivialised the purported essence of his speech by carelessly winking at a colleague soon after he returned to his seat after hugging PM Modi. But again, instead of discussing the points raised in his speech, social media discussions focused only on the hug, and the wink.

Of course, Rahul surely grabbed public attention by his hug but it remains to be seen if the electorates in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan will embrace the Congress when they go to election in the next few months.

The more explosive hug-spectacle was offered to the media by Sidhu when he embraced Pakistan’s army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa. It needs no elaboration why even as a polite gesture hugging a Pakistani army chief is prone to politicisation. Even though Sidhu had it made clear that he was attending the swearing-in as afriend of Imran (both had played cricket for their respective countries), some peoplewere waiting for Sidhu to make just one slip.

The outrage soon followed and almost became another deluge for the Congress party till the Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh, and state Congress President publicly disassociated from his hug. However, the controversy is likely to remain alive in the wake of Sidhu’s press conference targetting both PM Modi and the recently deceased Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Ironically, in December, 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unscheduled visit to the birthday party of his then Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif had elicited only raving approval by social media observers and others. During that encounter Modi had greeted Sharif’s mother by touching her feet, as it is the custom among many Hindu and Sikh families.

Thankfully, nobody had called Modi’s politeness ‘stooping low in front of the enemy’s mother’.

But since then at least two and a half monsoons have passed and several political developments have taken place since then in both India and Pakistan. Especially in Pakistan, where Sharif has been sentenced to ten years’ jail on corruption charges and the likes of Hafiz Saeed, who is on international terrorlists and hasbeen booted out by the voters. None of this seems to be on our mind while hammering Sidhu and the Congress for his embrace of the enemy.

While it’s surely debatable whether or not an Indian minister should hug the army chief of its ‘mortal enemy’ Pakistan, we should remember that this hug pales in comparison with Atal Bihari Vajpayee's famous bus trip to Lahore from Delhi in 1999.

Former Prime Minister Vajpayee had passed away just two days before Imran Khan’s swearing-in and if he was alive he would have surely been amused by the increasing juvenility of our public discourse.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL)