I had no idea that Vir Sanghvi, secularist par excellence is also a self-proclaimed liberal. As a sidenote, the liberal self-affixing of the term “liberal” in Indian public discourse is another moot point that often misleads Western India-watchers. A liberal in common parlance is one who emphasises (and fights for, if required) individual rights, freedom of thought and expression, limitation on power (especially government), the rule of law, a free market system and in general, a government that ensures that the rights of all its citizens are protected.

An Indian Liberal is a different beast. In its mildest form, it is a confused agglutination of democracy, socialism, half-baked knowledge, and rejected Western (social) etiquette. However, it is most dangerous in its subtle form: a Stalinist wolf in democratic attire. Underneath the hail-freespeech, long-live-democracy, cloak lies a hardcore believer of a violent revolution as nostrum for all of mankind’s ills.

More than anything, an Indian liberal is a coward. Example: his behaviour during the Emergency. While the real heroes are dead or forgotten or obscure, these worthies occupy cushy positions in the media and academia in the present time. And it doesn’t end there. Post-Emergency, these eminences set about systematically maligning whoever remained among those heroes.

This rather lengthy introduction was necessary to examine Vir Sanghvi’s childish column entitled, won’t get fooled again.

He begins with how censorship was the flavour of the season during the BJP’s regime… and on and on. Just when you thought he is being one-sided, he tilts his anti-BJP pitch and trains the gun on the Congress. This hate-BJP, hate-Congress parade goes on for a while. The gist is: both governments are equally intolerant of freedom of expression, and how as a liberal, he hates it. Nothing new. But the whole article stinks of hypocrisy.

We were liberals, we said. What happened to the tolerance that is the hallmark of a liberal democracy? Was the BJP going to Talibanise our society? And so on.

The language used when criticizing the BJP. The UPA government is actually out to create mini-Taliban groups in the name of reservation, Muslims first-claim, “model” Muslim villages, appalling silence on terrorism/Maoism… not a single word on that. Here’s a government which takes a public oath to appease minorities, and Sanghvi has nothing to say on that while he goes full blast against genuine protests over Water and Mian Hussain’s masterpieces of desecration.

So let’s this around and pose a few questions to the liberal Vir Sanghvi. Not that he’ll condescend to answer me.

Let’s agree that the treatment meted out to Hussain and Deepa Mehta were disgraceful. But protests do not arise in a vacuum: smoke and fire and all that. Yet, being the liberal, the champion of free speech he is, has he allowed the other side to voice its concerns about why Hussain and Mehta so infuriated them? His own paper had vehemently rejected the enactment of the Uniform Civil Code when the BJP was in power. Hardly exemplary of a liberal.

A Gurumurthy doesn’t get published in Hindustan Times while a rabid Islamic apologist like Khushwant Singh does.

As editor, what does this say about Sanghvi’s neutrality?

On Water, Sanghvi claims:

Nobody I know who’s seen the film, and not one reviewer of note, has regarded it as being anti-Indian.

Vir Sanghvi and his entire charmed circle of elite friends and reviewers are not spokesmen on India and Indian culture. Sanghvi and his cohorts know zilch about what makes Water such a despicable piece of scum. Vir Sanghvi’s fine-cocktail-sipping circle of intellectuals can never understand what values the miserable excuse for a film seeks to negate, and the distorted message it conveys about Hinduism. For the record, nobody has said anything about it being “anti-Indian.”

Actually, Sanghvi isn’t really blaming the Congress/Priya Dasmunshi. He is simply scared of the consequences that’ll follow if the new Broadcast bill is passed. He, and liberals of his ilk are now too advanced in age to even bend–forget crawling–if Emergency 2.0 is imposed.