Leave aside religion from this incident, lets focus on main issue: BULLYING

News of Shiv Sena MP force-feeding one of the employees of a catering company that supplies food to Maharashtra Sadan (a state guest house in Delhi for VIPs/ State dignitaries/officials of the State Government visiting Delhi) is getting a lot of media attention. The news created a lot of controversy because of the people involved in this incident, MPs (members of parliament) belonging to Shiv Sena (which is a right-wing party) tried to force-feed an employee who was from a Muslim community and was fasting during Ramadan month. So it was really easy to give a communal angle to this news and as expected there was an uproar in the media with so-called secular parties objecting to this incident and others who are sympathetic to Shiv Sena downplayed it as expected. Everything happened as expected, every party directly or indirectly tried to reap some political benefit from this issue.

This is a classic case of bullying, an employee was bullied by MPs who think they are powerful and the law cannot do anything to them. That employee's religion or whether he was fasting or not, whether it was some religious fast or not is really not important here. These public representatives, who are supposed to serve people and respect the law are seen doing such rouge behavior. They could have registered their displeasure about the quality or type of food served to them by using peaceful means. There was absolutely no need to bully an employee by intimidating him and forcefully feeding him the food. For some reason, the main focus of all this debate is that this particular employee was a Muslim, and Shiv Sena is a pro-Hindu party. It seems if this employee had been a Hindu or atheist fasting for health reasons then this action would have been acceptable as no religious sentiments would have been hurt. Religion a person getting bullied should not be an issue, bullying is bad no matter who is the perpetrator and who is the victim. 

Shiv Sena MPs are claiming that they were unaware of the concerned employee's religion when they did this act, it is quite possible that they were unaware of his religion but how does it matter? Does it make this act acceptable if these MPs were not aware of this person's religious affiliation? Obviously, the religious sentiments of the employee were hurt as he was fasting but the whole focus in this issue is wrongly focused on a communal angle leaving aside the broader issue of bullying and misuse of power. When public representatives engage in such shameless and blatant acts of bullying and don't even regret that it sends a wrong message to people. It seems it's okay to bully people if their religious sentiments are not hurt, it's fine to humiliate someone if they make a mistake. Bullying is a social evil and it should not be tolerated under any circumstances. Shiv Sena MPs should unconditionally apologize for this incident not just for hurting that person's religious sentiments but for bullying him. They should accept that whatever they did was wrong irrespective of that person's religion or fast.

Indian parliament also should show some courage and try to punish its misbehaving members setting an example to follow. It seems that parliament has no control over the behavior of its members, it has no power to take any disciplinary action, especially if perpetrators are from parties in power. The real issues always get sidelined or take a back seat in all political drama, finger-pointing, and mud-sledding. Sadly this happens after every incident like this, so far no MP, especially from the ruling party, has been disqualified or even suspended for any rude public behavior or making a derogatory statement. It seems people and institutions seem to base their reactions only on the people involved in it, based on their religion or political affiliation, and not on the severity of the incident. This post is an attempt from my side to request people to look at the real issues and not be carried away by emotions or religious sentiments which all political parties want us to do. Let's use our own minds to decide what is right and what is wrong and then act accordingly.

Thanks for reading and please share your views on this topic.

[Copyright: Vinay Thakur. Please contact the author for re-posting or publishing]

Links:
1. Uproar in LS over Sena MPs forcing man to break fast