I have been an
ardent fan of your songs and nurtured great respect for you. But the moment I
saw your disgusting antics with folded hands pleading to the Gorkhas expressing
your concern for the Lepchas of Gorkhaland, you got so unceremoniously exposed
with your fake humanism, artificial creative commitments, intellectual
duplicity and disdainful opportunism. The way you gestured with stilted
intonation for the Lepchas was so overwhelmingly reprehensive, as if the
Gorkahas were the most dreaded violators of basic human rights of the minor communities,
as if the Gorkhas were a criminal lot, hell bent on destroying and dislocating
the natives of Gorkhaland. This was the most disdainful image I could ever
imagine about you. The Lepchas are one of the original inhabitants of the
present Gorkhaland and they have become an integral part of the composite
culture of the land. And at the common level there has never been mutual
animosity between the two communities. Is it not ironic that the Bengal regime
and ruling elites, of which you are a part, shedding tears for them only for
the last couple years or so? Why did not you compose a few songs on their
plight in the beginning of your career? Even a fool can understand that it is a
part of a naughty Bengali chauvinistic politics to use the Lepchas as mere
conduits to neutralise and discredit the people’s movement for Gorkhaland. The
irony is this that the Bengal ruling regime, including the earlier clique of
notorious Bengal communists, always considers itself as the smartest lot of the
world because they can play well with rhetoric and consider the rest as a collection
of idiots.
Mr.
Suman you should go for an encore of your latest performance. You should also
fold your those two hands to the Bengalis of Tripura exhorting them to stop
injustice against the indigenous native Tripuris; you should also fold your
hands to your own government, your lady boss and to your Bengali compatriots
expressing your concern for the Rajbanshis, the Bodos, the Rabhas, the Dhimals
in North Bengal; you should also fold your hands and shed tears for the
atrocities being meted out to the Adivasis and other tribal in rest of Bengal.
But
you are not entirely to blame. You belong to an intellectual legacy which is largely
characterised by duplicity and vicious doublespeak. Most of them speak and
profess one thing in academic debates and practice quite another in practical
context. And it is not limited to the mediocre Bengali intellectuals only; this
duplicity applies even to the so called intellectual icons from Bengal
including Gayatri Spivak, Amartya Sen, Ranajit Guha, Paratha Chatterjee et al.
How come they are so conspicously silent at this juncture of a momentous crisis
of a peripheral and a marginal nation like the Gorkhas who have been subjected
to the most draconian state terrorism by the present Bengal regime? Why Mr.
Suman have you failed to raise a voice of disapproval when hundreds of innocent
women have been picked up by the state armed forces and put behind bars for
their crime of longing for a space of their own? Why have you failed to raise
your voice when false cases are being slapped against the innocents, acting so
cheap and nasty by going to the extent of impounding the passport of the Gorkha
leadership, showing utter disrespect to the entire people who represent the
voice of a marginalised nation? Some of them, with the air of an expert,
deliver long discourse on the futility of smaller states. If this is the case
why don’t you people chop Bengal into three solid pieces and let it merge with
Orissa, Bihar and Assam then the present Bengal can become parts of really big
states and prosper?
Mr.
Suman, you have been a creative genius, but you acted like a third grade clown.
People will only remember your latest image, and your songs then will be cited
as mere jokes of a fake artist, like a lesson on ethics by a castiest Brahmin.
