Saffron? So What?

It is now official that Team India will wear a new jersey, with orange colour, as it battles England in its next ICC World Cup match. But ‘secular’ political parties like the Congress and the Samajwadi Party have discovered something ‘saffron’ in it, suspecting a ‘saffron’ push by the Modi government in its ‘saffronization’ (an atrociously wrong word used so very often in India’s pseudo-secular universe) spree. Samajwadi Party leader Abu Azmi has hinted at a BJP hand in the BCCI’s decision and accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of trying to paint the entire country and its institutions with the saffron colour, while Congress legislator Naseem Khan has endorsed Azmi’s worldview, saying the Modi government is taking the country towards ‘saffronization’ in every field, be it sports, culture or education. This is completely out of place. What these self-styled secular parties conveniently overlook – in fact, they choose to overlook – is that saffron is a colour on our national flag. Orange or saffron robes are worn by the monks of the Ramakrishna Mission Order too, whose chief function it is to popularize the lofty spiritual ideals of Swami Vivekananda, the spiritual genius from this ancient land who informed the world of the vastness and the spiritual insight that Hinduism as a way of life holds while leaving the vast Western audience completely mesmerized at the famed World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1892. And what’s in a colour? Just because the BJP has chosen to use saffron as its colour it does not mean there is a Hindu hue to it and so it is communal. As long as the so-called ‘secular’ brigade, led by the Congress, chooses to remain myopic and paranoid even with colours, there is no scope for them at all to grow and be modern in their outlook. It boils down to it being a matter of choice.