Shoe-kriya : The Shoeing Act

On 7 April 2009, India's home minister P. Chidambaram was shoed by Jarnail Singh, a Sikh journalist who works at the Hindi daily Dainik Jagaran on the issue of clean chit to Jagdish Tytler.

Unfortunate........ very unfortunate the whole melodrama was. Neither it seems nor does it sound good. Yes, it does not left me feeling good to see a gentle and responsible person from the soil of Gandhi drawing wrong inspiration from the land of Saddam.

What the shoe-thrower Jarnail Singh communicated to media is that “my issue was right”. But what I believe is an issue is neither right nor wrong, that is why it is an issue. It can only be represented and the representation depends upon the acceptability of one of the thoughts or convictions underlying the very issue, by an individual or a group. And this representation should lead to sorting out of one ‘logical conclusion’ acceptable by all. An issue like an idea is always bigger than an individual act but a wrong act cannot be and should not be justified under the shade of one’s conviction about the correctness of an issue.

What I liked about this incident is Mr. Chidambaram’s response: he greeted the shoe with a smile on his face. The home minister ordered security to "Please take him away... Gently" and said to the gathering “Let the emotional action of a burnt person not hijack our press conference.”After few moments Jarnail Singh was released. This was quite different from the treatment given for same act to the person who have thrown shoe at Mr. Bush and this did not go into vain.

Later the journalist apologized to the minister and also came in media to say he is sorry for what happened. Moreover, he declined to take the money offered to him by the Sikh political party. Indeed, the right response from the minister has made him realise what he has done. This for sure would have delighted Gandhi.

This incident has one more aspect associated with it, ‘the general feeling of anguish over our judiciary system’. This Anti- Sikh Riot 1984 case took twenty-five years and many commissions and investigations to come to its final verdict. One more truth is there will be culprits who are not punished and innocents who got trapped. This in addition to the sloppy spread of the case over a quarter century is something really terrifying, alarming and adding to the dubious credibility of our judiciary. Certainly, this is the only aspect of our modern civilization that the Litchavians will not take by surprise and surely will not appreciate. We cannot blame them as we still rely most on not-so-reliable words of witnesses for justice, like done two millenniums ago. Very few things have changed and definitely they are not sufficient. There is an urgent need to revolutionize our system for the swift flow of justice. 

Hoping that we and our generation could help this cause...................

                                                                                                                    Bhargav