10 December 2014 06:59 pm Views - 1859
There was a time, very long ago, when insults were vivid, poetic, even lyrical.
“You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things,” boomed Marullus, a Roman tribune in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
“Out you green-sickness carrion!” thundered Capulet in the Bard’s Romeo and Juliet.
“Hold off, unhand me grey-beard loon,” yelped the Wedding Guest to the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Then there was an era, when a put-down was a bon mot, laced with intellect and wit.
“Am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play”, wrote George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchhill. “Bring a friend if you have one.”
“Cannot possibly attend first night,” wrote back Churchhill. “Will attend second, if there is one.”
But those days are long gone. Over the past decades, politicians around the world have shed all semblance of class and style in their attacks against each other.
While Turkish President Erdogan called protestors ‘looters’, the Turkish opposition called the ruling party’s leaders “half-intellectuals, terror peddlers, blood barons and death mongers”.
US President Barack Obama spoke of ‘kicking asses’ on television, while his predecessor George W. Bush once said that a journalist disliked by him was a ‘major league, A...hole’.
A British Conservative MP was forced to apologise for using the term ‘f..kwit’ on television.
German electoral candidate Peer Steinbruck called Silvio Berlusconi a ‘clown with a testosterone boost’.
Uruguayan President Jose Mujica called his Argentinean counterpart, Cristina Fernandez, an ‘old hag’ and her late husband a ‘cross-eyed man’.
Former French President Nikolas Sarkozy told the US President that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is a ‘liar’.
Former Prime Minister of Italy -- no slouch in the department of dodgy shenanigans with young ladies barely of legal age, called the German Chancellor an unf..k-able lard-a..se.”
When world leaders are putting such verbal elegance on display, can emerging superpower India be far behind? Can there be any political leaders in India, who would not shame the founding fathers of the country by employing the crudest rhetoric (usually involving somebody’s religion or mothers and sisters), all in the name of liberty, equality and brotherhood in the world’s largest democracy?
But make no mistake. Erudition is not restricted to men alone. Our women leaders are equally expressive.
At an election rally (ahead of assembly polls in New Delhi) on December 1, India’s new Minister for Food Processing Industries of the Hindu-nationalist BJP, Ms. Niranjan Jyoti, screamed at voters to choose between a government of ‘followers of Lord Ram’ (i.e. her party), or ‘bastards’. Though she was admonished by PM Narendra Modi and apologized, India’s parliament was held up for weeks, with the entire opposition demanding the pyorrheic motormouth’s resignation.
Please note: Ms Jyoti is no mere mortal. She wears saffron robes and calls herself a sadhvi; someone who has renounced worldly life and all its attachments (except abusiveness).
Bengal Chief Minister, Mamata Bannerjee, also a lady and not to be outdone in creative prowess, said of her political rivals just days later : “They were in power for 34 years and could do nothing. And now they are shoving the bamboo (up the a....ses) of those who are doing something.”
But these witty ladies are not alone. Here is but a small selection of what India’s verbally incontinent leaders have regurgitated in recent years:
Blood and murder are favourite metaphors.
The Italian-born opposition Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi has called India’s current Prime Minister Modi a ‘merchant of death’. Her party colleague and former foreign minister, Salman Khurshid, (otherwise one of clipped, Etonian tones) also found Modi ‘impotent’. Modi, never a slouch in the department of repartee, referred to the Congress party symbol of a hand as a ‘bloodied paw’. A former chief minister of Bihar said that Modi could ‘no longer sell tea (as Modi did once as a child) but only blood’. The Congress also talked about the ‘harvest of poison’ that the BJP, as a party, allegedly loves to reap. The BJP practises the ‘politics of blood’, declared Rahul Gandhi during the general election campaign earlier this year.
Women, especially ‘fallen’ ones, are another evocative choice for crafting insults. On an earlier occasion and when Modi wasn’t quite as mellow as he has become since he took the oath as PM, he had referred to the wife of a Congress politician accused of involvement in an INR 500 million cricket scam, as the ‘50-crore girlfriend’.
One BJP member suggested that the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul ‘be stripped and sent back to Italy’, another compared her absurdly to ‘Monica Lewinsky’ while yet another leader of a Hindu rightwing support group of the ruling party, finding himself (not unsurprisingly) at a loss for intellect, simply resorted to ‘Italian bitch’. The late Indira Gandhi (Sonia’s mother-in-law), too, had come under sneering, crude attack for her ‘bob-cut hair’. (In some chauvinistic boondocks of India, any woman with short hair = a woman of easy virtue) and as a ‘dumb doll’. A Maharashtra Hindu rightwing party leader has called the new “Party of the Common Man”, AAP, an ‘item girl of Indian politics’. Bengal’s lady chief minister Mamata Bannerjee was once compared by her political rival to the ‘sex workers’ of Kolkata’s red-light district.
After fallen women and nautch-girls, can illegitimacy be far behind?
A Karnataka politician called his successor as CM a ‘bloody bastard’ and the ‘son of a bitch’. The provocation? The latter had said that a certain infrastructure project had been the ‘illegitimate child’ of his predecessor’s government.
Food items, fruits and vegetables too, come in handy to abuse one another.
A deceased rightwing leader once called his rival, a portly chief minister, a ‘sack of flour’. A current minister with an important portfolio, on an earlier occasion, called the ageing chief of his own party a ‘rancid pickle’, who should give way for fresh young blood within the party. Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law called India’s new AAP party ‘mango men in a banana republic” (the Hindi words for ‘common’ and ‘mango being the same).
Finally, then there is always the animal kingdom, particularly because it can be so conveniently combined with Hindu mythology, replete as it is with four-legged mascots of many kinds.
Remarking on current PM Modi’s unprecedented popularity, one opposition Congress party member said that Modi was not astride a white horse, but was the God of Death (Yamraj) atop a buffalo”. An opposition politician in Gujarat added his imaginative two-bit. Modi, he said, was a ‘monkey challenging the king of the jungle from the treetops’.
It may be too much to expect our busy leaders to improve on their education or take some leaves out of the likes of Mark Twain or GBS.
But how about the late Belgian great, Herge’s Tintin comics? Here is a link of the vituperative Captain Haddocks.
http://www.tintinologist.org/guides/lists/curses.html
From antediluvian bulldozer to bashi-bazouk, from diplodacus and cro-magnon to visigoths: there are 212 of the beloved cartoon character’s nonsensical curses which parents and children have delighted in -- safely -- for decades.
To the world’s politicians, I have this to advise; the next time you take to the microphone in the august halls of your parliament, do take your pick from among them. They may even help improve the abysmal and rapidly falling standard of English and pull it out of the deep doldrums it has sunk into around the world.
Take that, you inter-planetary goats!