Coal Minister has forgotten the endearing stories
As analogies go, this one is among the least offensive, even complimentary, given that people have been earlier likened to “Maut ke saudagar”, “Yama” and “Bhasmasur”. In the same measure, Union Minister Beni Prasad Verma had opined that Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav was not “fit to even sweep the Prime Minister's Office”. Now, Union Minister for Coal Sriprakash Jaiswal has called former Coal Secretary PC Parakh a ‘Sheikh Chilli'. Mr Parakh's crime is that he dragged the Prime Minister's name in a coal block allocation issue which also involves noted industrialist Kumar Mangalam Birla. While Mr Jaiswal's outrage is understandable though not justified, the perplexing part is the comparison. The Minister seems to have forgotten the stories he must have heard as a child and read in books about Sheikh Chilli. The good Sheikh Chilli was a simpleton and a harmless man, though woefully short of basic intelligence. The tales that relate to him show him as being inevitably short-changed. How does this lead to the comparison that Mr Jaiswal has madeIJ Mr Parakh is no simpleton, nor can he have been misled to make the statement which has caused such furore. As a retired IAS officer and among the sharpest minds in the line of duty, he did not lack either intelligence or common sense. If Mr Parakh did say what he has under some provocation and out of Chilli-like stupidity, the Minister should let us know. If Mr Jaiswal wanted to mean that Mr Parakh was merely daydreaming when he named the Prime Minister or saw conspiracies, then he should have invoked a better comparison: That with Mungeri lal. Those who had the fortune to read about this character and watch a well-crafted televised adaptation years ago (Mungeri lal ke haseen sapney), know that Mungeri day-dreamed, and that essentially led to his counting the chickens before they hatched.
Mr Parakh's analogy with Mungeri lal would have been an improvement on Sheikh Chilli, for sure, but even that would not have been accurate. Mr Parakh, unlike Mungeri lal, has lived and worked in the world of reality. His statement about the Prime Minister came after the Central Bureau of Investigation named him in its FIR for alleged irregularities in allotting coal blocks to Mr Kumar Mangalam Birla's firm. So, poor Mr Jaiswal has got everything completely wrong. He is much like the enthusiastic Don Quixote who charged at windmills, mistaking them for enemy ranks. The Minister is shooting at the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, all under the belief that he is actually countering an enemy of the Congress, and, thus by extension, of the Prime Minister and the UPA Government. Amusingly, the Coal Minister, who currently presides over a department which is neck deep in what is perhaps the biggest scam independent India has seen, finds no necessity to own up responsibility. He's busy shooting his mouth off.