By Aditya Aamir
Of course, the Congress was not involved. Rogues wearing the Congress name on their sleeves busted into tyre shops and tested them in an innovating manner, cast the tyre round a Sikh neck to see how the tyre burned, the Sikh burned. The testing method caught on and Congressi-looking men tried it on other Sikh necks.
Now when the son of the man, whose mother was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, denies there was a Congress involvement in the 1984 Sikh massacre, he cannot be harried endlessly, from London to Delhi. After all he was a kid at the time, not old enough to join a political party whereas today he is the Congress. Those days Congress was Indira and Indira was Congress! When Indira was assassinated the Congress died with her. October 31, 1984 the Congress was killed.
A new Congress was born much later after the government of the day committed itself to democracy by putting down a headless pogrom of massacre of Sikhs who just happened to be chosen to test tyres because their turbans made them stand out in a crowd.
A new party with the name Congress was born and it had nothing to do with the Indira Congress and Sikhs complaining today and holding Rahul Gandhi responsible is so out of sync with the current times when we have moved beyond massacres, leaving such killings to outfits like the ISIS, which like everybody with grey cells will know is a creation of joblessness and has nothing to do with a virulent form of Islam.
If all that’s written above sounds like a theatre of the absurd, please don’t forget that there were and there are even now people not sound in the head who refer to the Sikh as the ‘Surd’. Yep, the Sikh is the butt of many jokes and you do not have to look very far, just turn the pages and catch up with some Santa-Banta jokes.
Santa and Banta jokes make for a good laugh at the expense of the Sikh and Rahul was doing just, telling a Santa-Banta joke to Englishmen who in any case wouldn’t have caught on because the Brits are legendary tight-lips and clipped lips and stiff upper lips and if you give them the lip they will if not lash with the tongue keep the tongue firmly in the cheek.
Yeah, it’s become an episodic habit to pull 1984 out every time a Gandhi takes to the stage and those with even a little intelligence will know that it’s lack of intelligence that limits people to just the one question. ‘1984’ is also a book written by an Englishman and that was a big hit. If the question was not thrown to Rahul, there would have been no way Sambit Patra would have got the chance to make a song and dance of it.
As any kid on the block, even the new one, will tell, Sambit Patra is the closest the BJP has come up with Santa-Banta but his jokes are stale, as old as 1984 when, if Sambit Patra is to be believed, he was yet to be born! Sambit Patra claims to be the youngest spokesperson making an ass of himself on television and he insists on it unlike Rahul Gandhi who refutes with the indignation worthy of a King.
Making an ass of yourself is an art and Sambit Patra is forever at making an ass of the Congress while unknowingly making an ass of himself. The million dollar question: Does he make an ass of the BJP when he’s making ass of himself? Even a clown like Navjot Singh Sidhu will answer that without batting an eyelid, the answer is a ‘No’.
That established ask, “How can the Congress alias Rahul Gandhi be blamed for Congressi-like apparitions testing rubber tyres cast around Sikh necks in 1984 after a big tree fell and shook the earth? If Sambit making an ass of himself does not mean the BJP making an ass of itself, then how can a few Congressi lookalikes making a killing in 1984 mean Rahul Gandhi and his Congress made a killing when Rahul was of an age that didn’t know the tree from the wood.
It is time the Sikh got sick of 1984 and the BJP stopped jumping with alacrity at the mention of 1984. Haven’t whispers been heard of RSS-types too testing tyres that year? If anybody should be held responsible for the pogrom of 1984, it is the tyre-makers of that time. People had never seen a big tree fall and the kind of fall it would make.
Today, people are tired of the same old tyre rolled out every five years. Will people just roll on and move on to other trying matters like the homegrown Muslim Brotherhood who will never have Mecca in their itinerary because they don’t say ‘Inshallah’ when in doubt, they are so used to Jai Sri Ram?
Didn’t a big tree fall when Ravana abducted Sita and wasn’t Rama’s reaction much the same, a general massacre of Lankans who were barred from Ashok Vatika and but for Hanuman would have never heard of Sita or Rama or Hanuman, now a celebrated cartoon character? Move on folks, 1984 will never come again, not after twice making headlines!
(IPA Service)