Azam Khan loves to court controversies like an ageing star struggling to get the paparazzi moving. Now that the Samajwadi Party is a thing of past in UP and the family feud of Mulayam Singh Yadav is not interesting enough to make it to primetime debates, Azam Khan does not have enough fodder to be in news.
When politicians run out of concrete arguments or facts against the ruling party, they resort to means that has for long been a tried and tested trick to capture the political landscape of the country – incite people on communal lines.
But this is no more the country that it used to be – or so we would like to believe.
Azam Khan’s recent antics are funny and unfortunate at the same time. After what happened in Kasganj it was expected that some or the other politician from Samajwadi Party will try to blame it on the majority community and would drag the central government in the entire episode.
It’s heinous to not mention Modi in your media bytes these days. So, Mr Azam Khan just did the routine and blamed Hindus and their unemployment for the entire ruckus.
It’s unfortunate because a person was killed. His only fault was that he wanted to flaunt his love for the country. Azam Khan does not have the courtesy to mourn the death, rather he is trying to drag PM Modi in the mud.
Azam Khan was quoted as saying, “I have been demanding that only boys and girls of the majority community should be provided with employment opportunities so that they are busy with their works. This will keep them from taking up arms and prevent riots. The country has moved towards anarchy and it would be better if the youth started selling pakoras as advised by the PM.”
How you conduct yourself public and the kind of words you use in the media is a reflection of the ideals you believe in. And here Azam Khan just showed where he comes from and what his idea of India is. To say such things when there is tension in the air suggests that these so called secular parties and their politicians will go to any extent to derive political mileage out of such episodes. The fact that he found support from another Samajwadi Party leader Ram Gopal Yadav, who said that Kasganj was orchestrated by members of the Hindu community, only shows the kind of dirt these leaders have on them.
The rebuttal of Azam Khan’s comment came from BJP spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia who said that it was now a culture to pass such comments.
Frustration leads to people going too far with their comments. While sometimes it comes back to haunt them later, mostly it causes immediate damage to reputation, if there’s something left of it. Azam Khan’s attempt to link this entire episode to unemployment while trying to twist the narrative fell flat on its face. Primarily because he does not have the clout that he once enjoyed with the media. His brand of politics is tempting but has not yielded much result of late; so much so that the leader of such kind of politics – Congress – is shifting towards soft Hindutva. It does not need to be reminded that even that has not worked!
In such a scenario, it is advisable that he refrain from making a fool of himself in the media. Such comments are often replayed during the times of election, and it will only consolidate the ‘unemployed youth’ and its vote which quite nonchalantly threw Mr Khan and his party from the assembly the last time there were elections in UP. And if he is so interested in being in news, he can always fall back on his buffaloes instead of trying to do pity politics in the name of a deceased whose death can very well be traced to the hate-politics that Mr Khan and many like him have been doing since decades!