By Apoorva Sripathi
In the vein of “rasam of realpolitik” comes yet another remark that is absurd, pointless and demeaning.
Quoted by several websites, the remark, made by Maharashtra MLC Prashant Paricharak at a rally, goes like this. “A soldier receives a telegram from wife giving him news that she has delivered a baby and he becomes so happy that he starts distributing sweets. But, he has not visited his home for a whole year. This is the level of politics we have stooped to.”
Apparently, he was criticising the NCP leaders with his remarks, because, according to him, they were taking credit for supplying water from Ujani dam in Solapur district — where it is a sensitive issue, reports Hindustan Times.
Where do we even begin?
First, we’d like to know who writes Paricharak’s speeches because frankly a five-year-old delivering a fancy dress costume speech makes more sense than this MLC from our ruling party.
Second, if this is his idea of a colourful metaphor then we’ve finally figured the source of all the crappy ‘wife’ ‘jokes’ that arrive in all our family Whatsapp groups. Ask not who wrote them, Prashant Paricharak probably did. It’s got all the ingredients: Cheating wives, cuckolded husbands secretly humiliated and heh-heh-heh.
Wouldn’t Paricharak have been in less soup if had just said that it was to the BJP that credit should go for resolving the issue. But of course, as we all know, our politicians say the darndest things about women. And rightly angered by this, a Mani Tripathi has started a Change.org petition asking for Paricharak to withdraw his words and resign because ‘fauji wives won’t tolerate this insult’. Not that our politicians haven’t already delivered plenty insult to fauji families through the slashing of disability pensions.
Paricharak, who expressed “regret” over his statements, reportedly ‘clarified’ that he was only trying to point out the “credit-seeking” mindset of his opponents and that he had “no intentions” of hurting and insulting the jawans. How much ‘clarification’ needs to be done is proportionate to how deep your dive in the gutter was in the first place.
And sure, if gratuitously insulting the armed forces and their families is the MLC’s method of rallying support in the upcoming local body polls, we can’t wait to see what tricks he has up his sleeve when it comes to general elections.