I wrote just a few days ago about the personal sense of loss and grief that someone like me feels when lives are lost in the line of military duty. Often the people who lost their lives and their families would be known to us, but even otherwise the loss feels immediate, somehow connected. And then when I hear about the hounding of the child of one of those brave-hearts that lost their lives, I take that personally. When a fauji child – like Aashna Lidder has to delete her Twitter account, I take it personally – because I have fauji brats of my own.
This is a class XII student who has published a book – In Search of a Title: Musings Of A Teenager. One tweet shared by Kiran Bedi is that of her book launch where the two are seen sharing a stage. As she addresses the gathering in that video as well as this video – which is now viral – we see a young girl who is clearly devoted to her dad and very proud of him.
Listening to Aashna Lidder we see a young person who is clear in her thoughts, articulate, confident – the sort of young Indian that Indians can be proud of, identify with. However, this young Indian was the target of so much hate from other Indians that she had to delete her Twitter account. Why? Because she is a girl who dared to have a political view of her own – one that she expressed.
The patriotism of a martyr’s child is called into question, though there can be no doubt about this when we view the video. However, the notion of patriotism has become so narrow, so confined in recent times that even this is called into question.
On the one hand, we saw utterly heart wrenching images of families grieving those they lost – poignant images of a wife and a daughter saying their last goodbyes to Brig L S Lidder among them. Aashna Lidder, the brigadier’s grieving daughter was seen to be speaking with great dignity and composure through her obvious pain. And then we heard the news about her being hounded on social media – so much so that she had to delete her Twitter account.
Her old tweets were dug up and a lot of very personal comments were made about her. In this screenshot of her tweet (below), she is seen to be calling out a disrespectful and classist remark made by the sitting Chief Minister of a state about his political opponent. As the citizen of this country, she was only doing something that is her right, even her duty – asking for accountability from leaders; expecting some amount of civility in their public discourse.
Some people describe Aashna as ‘woke’ – the negative implication of the term being clear here. Because apparently being aware and empathetic to causes is a terrible thing to be. As is usual in such cases, there was the infantilising of a young person and their ideas. If the ideas of a young person do not conform to the dominant narrative, then of course this is because she has been ‘confused’ or ‘misdirected’. Such a person has to be ‘guided’ in the right direction and made to ‘course correct’
Some of the attacking tweets were probably from accounts that are a part of the IT cell, whose only job is to attack and hound anyone that dares to counter or question a dominant narrative. However, the view that disapproves of young people forming and voicing their own opinions is common as well. The expectation is that children must obey, not question. They must meekly submit, never ask why – only then are they ‘good children’.
The fact that the current dispensation has a problem with anyone who questions or criticizes or dissents seems to have percolated down to the general populace. We seem to see ourselves as a monolith with one view, one mindset, one way of life. Whatever happened to our robust tradition of discussion, debate and agreeing to disagree? Must we view everyone with a contrary view as an enemy? Whatever happened to Amartya Sen’s celebrated Argumentative Indian?
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