This is not new year. Nor is it any other special occasion. But sheer stupidity of some people has prompted me to write this. This write-up is dedicated to all those who are victimized by this sort of stupidity of people whose deeds and attitudes affect if not dictate the lives of thousands if not millions. To be honest, some people in the list deserve more obnoxious adjectives and I am not sure if that amounts to criminality but for uniformity's sake I'll label them simply as 'stupid'. That leaves a lot of scope for reading between the lines.
Rank 5: Chandan Mitra, India
Politics often thrives in demagoguery. But sometimes the words come back to haunt the speaker. When Amartya Sen, renowned economist, said that he does not want to see Narendra Modi, BJP's likely choice, as the PM of India, this BJP MP came up with the knee-jerk reaction: how dare a person who received the coveted Bharat Ratna from a BJP Prime Minister utter those words? Naturally a furore followed and even the BJP had to distance itself from the remarks even as Sen decently rebuked Mitra like this: if indeed AB Vajpayee asks me to return what he gave me, I am ready to return it.
Rank 4: Akhilesh Yadav, India
The Outlook magazine had the cover story "Young MP's: Betrayal of hope" last week where they explored the disappointing under-performance of the young elected people. Yadav is the young Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state of India with more than 200 million inhabitants. He has been in news of late for allegedly suspending Durga Shakti Nagpal, an administrative officer for clamping down on the mining mafia in the state. The real pretext was, of course, duly fabricated but the truth could not hide for long as one SP leader gloated to have 'transferred Nagpal in 41 minutes' by 'speaking to Mulayam Singh Yadav and Akhilesh Yadav'. Moral of the story: the trust placed by the state electorate on this young man has been misplaced as he has also followed the duly established mode of governance in one of the most backward states in India: patronize the powerful and wealthy, be they crooks or criminals and penalize anyone who dares speak against them.
On a parallel note, the complicity of Yadav government on helping a Hindu religious zealot to subvert the entire judicial system was exposed by a sting investigation of a weekly.
Rank 3: Toru Hashimoto, Japan:
'No rape, No base', says a statement inscribed in a play card held by the people demonstrating against the sexual violence by the American army servicemen in Okinawa, Japan. Indeed making provisions by which the American servicemen can freely indulge in rape and other sexual violence with immunity has been a major sticking point whenever the US tries to finalize the so called 'SOFA' agreements in countries after invasion and devastation have to be followed by military bases. But the outspoken Osaka Mayor Hashimoto meant something else when he passed a damning verdict on the hundreds of thousands of Asian women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese before and during the WWII: that they were not the victims of a crime, rather than the necessary objects to provide 'respite for a groups of high-strung, rough and tumble crowd of men braving their lives under a storm of bullets'.
While the relentless rightward swing of Japan, with current Prime Mnister Shinzo Abe on the lead, may or may not restore its pre-WWII military glory and/or decades old economic glory, it will definitely alienate its neighbors who have the sour memory from the past. The remarks of the fanatical nationalists like Hashimoto have been, on the other hand, helping Japan to depict itself as the land of utterly self-serving people devoid of ordinary sense of decency and moral aptitude. If a Chinese group of high-strung, rough and tumble crowd of men braving their lives under a storm of bullets somehow overruns Japan in a conflict and needs a respite, would Hashimoto find it OK to let the Japanese women into sexual slavery to bring them a respite?
