The Internet is buzzing with Tripura chief minister Biplab Kumar Deb’s howlers over the past few days. But he is not the only one among Indian politicians to have delivered bloopers over the past few years.
In fact, Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani on Sunday, April 29, drew a parallel between search engine Google and the mythological character, Narad Muni. In Ahmedabad, Rupani said, “This is relevant in today’s time that Narad was a man of information… Google is the source of information just like Narad, because he knew everything happening in the world.”
Biplab Kumar Deb, the newly elected chief minister of Tripura, may get a firm reprimand from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah – as they have reportedly called Deb for his bizarre comments over the past few days. Modi and Shah might take a “special class” in Delhi on May 2 for Deb, it was reported.
On April 17, while addressing a regional workshop on computerisation of the public distribution system in Agartala, Deb had said: “This is the country where the episodes of the Mahabharata war were narrated to Dhritarashtra by Sanjay. This means technology was there, internet was there, satellite was there.”
And he was very serious about the statement, that he justified repeatedly on camera.
On April 27, he lambasted beauty pageants, questioned the crowning of Diana Hayden as Miss World and praised Aishwarya Rai saying she represented Indian women “in the true sense”. Later, he apologised for his comments. The following day, he said civil engineers were better suited for civil services when compared to mechanical engineers. The very next day, April 29, he said youths would have bank balance of Rs 5 lakh if they opened paan shops instead of running after political parties to get a government job.
There were many others before Deb to have made such comments. The most common these days is to take resort to mythological characters to make people believe that science and technology were practised in ancient India. This has been a Hindu nationalists’ way of highlighting the notion that modern science and technology was part of the lives of people in ancient India.
Earlier this year, the minister of state for human resources and development (HRD) Satyapal Singh had claimed that Charles Darwin’s theory of human evolution was “scientifically wrong”.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had himself said some years ago that Lord Ganesha had undergone plastic surgery through technology and Indians had such expertise at the time.
Deb is not the first to make such bizarre comments. Nor will he be the last.
