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I met Vivek Kumar, JNU professor in Social Sciences, long time back. I found him to be quite a reasonable guy with BSP leanings. Well, he has the freedom to follow any ideology, any leader.

But to suggest that the duties of the personal security officer of the chief minister also include cleaning shoes is simply objectionable and unacceptable. Howsoever junior the government official (I somehow don’t like the word government servant or civil servant) may be, they have a dignity that the political system must learn to respect.

Vivek Kumar was making a desperate effort to defend former chief minister Mayawati for letting her shoes get cleaned by her PSO.

The debate beamed on a national channel last night was on the intemperate behavior of UP cabinet minister Mohd Azam Khan at a departmental meeting convened by him in the state capital. Somehow it digressed to the ‘cleaning of shoe’ incident as one of the panelists mentioned the treatment meted out to officials during Mayawati’s regime.

Two wrongs don’t make one right.

Coming to Azam Khan, as we understand, the principle secretary of the department Pravir Kumar, an officer of high integrity and competence, was in the court attending a case. Another senior official Sunita Chaturvedi was attending a meeting of some committee.

Agreed the minister had reasons to get angry because the meeting had been fixed well in advance. But court dates are not decided by them or their department.

Even if the officers had erred in skipping the minister’s meeting, that doesn’t give him the license to snub, rather abuse, a senior officer, who was only trying to explain the reasons for the absence of his colleagues, with words like ‘badtameez’ and ‘chup ho jaaye‘.

And this is not the first time that he has lost cool and used foul language.

I fail to understand how a minister whose mother language is Urdu could speak like this. As far as I know that Urdu is the sweetest language and is laden with cultural-social sophistication.

And all this happens in Lucknow, the city of adab and andaaz.

Even Mulayam Singh Yadav has rarely rebuked anyone in this fashion. His son , the head of the government in which Azam is a minister, is highly courteous in all official meetings.

This is one difference that the officials were counting on when the rule of Mayawati ended. But lo, even that is being washed away by those who are otherwise known for high integrity and courtesies.

‘Azam ko gussa kyon aata hai‘. It’s time, the CM finds out.

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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