Abject ethnic and racial profiling?
Letter to the Hoot: Ketkar's reference was to the Bohras in the crowd at the two venues, with men sporting scull-caps and beards and women clad in open burqas.
SHREEKANT SAMBRANI is amazed at an assertion made on Karan Thapar~s show.
Karan Thapar’s To The Point on Headlines Today on Tuesday, 18 November, 2014 had the theme “Modi gets crowd, Congress gets jealous.” He was discussing the Salman Khurshid claim that the crowds at the Modi rallies in the United States and Australia were mostly transported from India. Thapar’s guests included journalists Kumar Ketkar and Varghese K George.
Thapar asked Ketkar whether he believed the Congress claim. Ketkar said that while all 20,000 may not have been sent from India, it was “absolutely possible and routinely done that some people are flown either by the party or they are organised by the local unit”. He believed that to send 500-600 people would be sufficient to create the frenzied response that was seen. He also said “You do not have the same Muslim faces in Madison Garden as well as in the stadium in Australia, with the same sort of wardrobe.” Thapar was flabbergasted by the assertion and asked whether Ketkar could really identify the faces.
Ketkar responded, “I cannot say from the television that it is the same man, but one can definitely have a genuine suspicion whether the people are being brought and some Muslims are being brought with a typical Muslim dress... Modi does not require people to be flown there but people are flown and this technique was developed by Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972 elections and it is elaborately written about in The Selling of a President 1968 and 1972 (sic).”
Ketkar’s reference was to the Bohras in the crowd at the two venues, with men sporting skull caps and beards and women clad in open burqas. This is the way traditional Bohras appear from Sydney to Singapore to Surat to Stockholm to San Francisco. Ketkar implied in no uncertain manner that they all looked alike to him. If any Americans remarked that all Blacks/Orientals looked alike to them, they would be labelled rednecks and their comment dubbed racist, and rightly so.
Ketkar is entitled to his political preferences, opinions and even fanciful inferences based on questionable extrapolations of observations from another era and geography. But should one who is a near permanent fixture on all and sundry nightly news channel discussions not know better than to resort to abject ethnic and religious profiling?
Sincerely,
Shreekant Sambrani
Pune
23 November 2014
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