Poor Azam Khan. After all, the Uttar Pradesh minister for urban development is facing the music for very modest ambitions. The website of the UP Legislative Assembly shows the 65-year-old minister has so far visited only five foreign countries – Saudi Arabia, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. So what if he has added five more to that list?
Khan has so far been best known for two things: one, his resignation from the Samajwadi Party in 2009 and subsequent meek re-entry at a lightning speed; and two, he wears his religion on his sleeves. The latter was more than evident from his remarks on Monday that the 18-day tour of Uttar Pradesh MLAs will lead to empowerment of Muslims and that the communal forces in the country just can’t tolerate the fact that a “Muslim ghareeb” like him is leading the tour.
For the moment, let’s forget Khan’s outlandish description of himself as a “ghareeb”. Going by that definition of poverty, many of India’s billionaires would find themselves below the poverty line.
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But what Khan, who is also in charge of the Muzaffarnagar district where thousands find themselves homeless after the September riots, left unanswered was how on earth a junket to Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Italy, Netherlands, the UK and the UAE would lead to empowerment of Muslims. Television images of the ministers and MLAs showed the only empowerment that they were looking at was getting enough breaks in the “study tour” for shopping and posing for pictures.
To be fair to him, the media may be a trifle unkind to Khan. He has obviously taken inspiration from previous study tours of some of his peers in other states. Consider, for example, a Karnataka minister’s comments after he and his fellow legislatures came back from a 15-day tour of Australia, New Zealand and Fiji earlier this month at the state’s expense. “We went abroad to study the living conditions of the tribes there and learnt of poverty,” the minister said.
That’s not very different from the claims made in a report submitted by another delegation of MLAs who went to China, Japan and Singapore. The report said travelling by a bullet train (at speeds that crossed 300 kmph), the legislators observed “modern agricultural practices and traffic laws on the highways of China”.
That’s some observation power indeed. In that sense, one feels sorry for those MLAs who were supposed to leave for a 12-day tour of Brazil, Peru and Argentina, but have been stopped in their tracks by the Assembly Speaker as the media played party-pooper. That’s patently unfair as the MLAs wanted to study and replicate the “exuberant ecosystems of Rio’s tropical urban jungle, including the waterfalls” in their state. That’s infinitely more important than minor distractions like drought in vast swathes of the state and acute drinking water shortage in more than 500 villages.
So next time our legislators want to go to London to do some shopping at Harrods and Selfridges to form an opinion on the pressing issue of foreign direct investment in retail, don’t protest too much.
As for Azam Khan, the poor fellow surely needs some time to unwind and enjoy the riot of red, yellows and browns in woodlands across the UK next autumn.