Sehwag hits another six

Former Indian cricketer Virender Sehwag seems to have more grey matter and wit than all the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) members’ put together. The way he has satirized the fake championing of free speech by Left-liberals is admirable.

I have often discussed Left-liberals are phony champions of liberty; in fact, they are the enemies of free speech, for they promote illiberal concepts like political correctness and multiculturalism. So, let’s focus on Sehwag’s latest swashbuckling stroke, this time outside the cricket ground.

There is a young girl Gurmehar Kaur, the daughter of late Captain Mandeep Singh who died in the Kargil War, who had the courage to take on the student wing of the ruling party. ABVP activists recently indulged in violence at Delhi University’s Ramjas College. She changed her Facebook profile picture, with the new showing her holding a placard, boldly announcing, “I am a student of Delhi University. I am not afraid of ABVP. I am not alone. Every student of India is with me. #fightbackdu #studentsagainstabvp.”

So far, so good, but where she falters is when she blindly accepts the Leftwing dogma. In another placard, she says, “Pakistan did not kill my dad, war killed him.” Which means that, along with pinkish doctrines, she has also swallowed the jihadist propaganda hook, line, and sinker.

It needs to be mentioned here that during the cold war era, KGB and other communist bodies promoted peace movements all over the world. The idea was simple: the Soviet Union and other communist countries, being dictatorships, could do anything they wanted to without showing any regard to the views and wishes of people; but the United States and other Western nations, which were democracies, had to respect popular opinion, which often hampered their military preparedness and thus created asymmetry.

In the contemporary context, the anti-war propaganda similarly though indirectly helps Pakistan and other jihadist nations and groups; for, like the communist nations of yore, jihadist nations would do what they want to do.

Kaur seems to be too young, immature, and uninformed to know the intricacies of Islamist functioning. She has unquestioningly imbibed the idea that war is something evil, to be opposed at any cost in any circumstances. She says that war killed her father, as if war were some asteroid or volcano, outside the control of any human agent. What the poor girl doesn’t realize is that her ignorance is almost tantamount to disrespect to her own father. He, and hundreds of other Indian soldiers, did not die because some non-human agency was involved; it is a universally accepted fact that Pakistan was the aggressor and India the defender. Captain Singh and others died because the powers that be in Rawalpindi and Islamabad had dared to seize our land.

Sehwag responded in the most apt manner to Kaur’s puerile pacifism. He also held a placard that said, “I didn’t score two triple centuries, my bat did.” This was perfect repartee to the war-killed-my-father idiocy. By lampooning her, Sehwag put the human agency in individual feats. He has shown that he has wit and intelligence—the faculties the ABVP lacks.