Mahua Moitra spent most of her life outside India and is now preaching Indians about their country

Recently, a first-time MP from the TMC, Mahua Moitra, hogged the limelight after her maiden speech in the lower house of the Parliament. Her speech was based on the long-standing opposition agenda of fear-mongering that fascism has arrived in India and with the Modi government getting re-elected by a humungous mandate, it is firmly establishing its roots in India.

Her speech was based on bizarre analogies and flawed logic which makes a person look at everything in black and white without understanding the complexity of ground realities. Her argument against the NRC, for example, was based on the argument that India, being a country where ministers fail to show their degrees in order to prove that they have graduated from college, how could dispossessed poor people be expected to show papers proving their citizenship. Therefore, just because a minister has allegedly misrepresented his educational qualification, illegal immigrants should not be pushed back to the country of their origin. However, this is not for the first time that Mahua Moitra has made it to headlines. Last year, Moitra had come in the spotlight after Mahua Moitra was seen assaulting a woman constable at the Silchar Airport. The lady constable had reportedly suffered injuries.

The liberal brigade celebrated her maiden speech as some sort of a milestone event. The Lutyens’ media and leftist portals started praising her as the new star of Indian politics soon after she gave her first speech on the floor of the Lok Sabha. Interestingly, Moitra saw signs of India breaking apart and rising signs of fascism. She said, “Only if you would open your eyes, you would see that there are signs everywhere, that this country is being torn apart.” She also claimed that the nation was heading towards fascism and in order to back her claim, she made a reference to a US Holocaust memorial museum poster put up in 2017 that “contained the list of all the signs of early fascism” and also claimed that each of these signs is visible in India. It is highly illogical and mechanical to apply a straightjacket formula in order to make a judgment upon the prevailing political scenario. However, the liberal brigade is going head over heels clearly because Moitra is pushing an agenda that the liberal brigade has failed to justify ever since the Modi government came to power for the first time in 2014.

This is rather extensive knowledge for someone who spent a major chunk of her life outside India. Moitra who is 44 years old had left for the US along with her family at an early age of 15. She studied economics and mathematics at the Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and went on to work as an investment banker at the JP Morgan, eventually rising to the post of company vice-president. She came back to India only in 2008 and joined the Congress. However, she later switched sides and joined the Mamata Banerjee led party. Having remained outside India for most of her life and most probably being unaware of how the Indian political system works, she has suddenly realised that India is turning into something else. And this is when she has no first-hand knowledge of how India was when she was spending her life abroad, her knowledge of those times are most probably based on dogmas and carefully articulated stories by an influential ecosystem. One cannot help but doubt her realisation of India changing into something else given her life story and the fact that she has spent a major chunk of her life outside India.