Over the past few days, a well-known and fairly accomplished Senior IPS Officer, who is currently the Home Secretary to the State Government of Karnataka, has been in the news for her public spat on Twitter with a widely followed and encyclopaedic anonymous commentator on history who prefers to go by the Twitter pseudonym, “True Indology” which is perhaps a nom de guerre. The spat was triggered by the IPS Officer’s tweet in support of the ban on the use of firecrackers on the occasion of Diwali. More than her support for the ban, a position she is perfectly entitled to take, what started the debate was her comment that bursting of firecrackers was not “essential” to the celebration of Diwali and that “non-essential religious practices” were mere dispensable “social practices”. This invited a response from other “tweetizens” including True Indology who dismantled her position brick by brick with reference after reference which clearly demonstrated that bursting of firecrackers had a specific religious significance, and was not merely an act of festivity and celebration. As someone who has presented the scriptural and documented evidence on the subject before the Supreme Court in Arjun Gopal v. Union of India in 2017 and 2018 in the context of the firecracker ban, I am in some position to endorse the views of True Indology.
That said, I am not on the IPS Officer’s uninformed views; after all, the fundamental right to hold a thought and express it is equally available to all hues of views, informed, not-so-informed, somewhat informed and utterly uninformed. However, after having taken a public position from her official handle, instead of engaging on merits with True Indology’s authority-backed counters, let alone disproving him, it appears that the IPS Officer demanded True Indology to divulge his personal details (privacy and due process, what are they?) and when he refused to do so, she is reported to have quipped “Your time is up”.
Yukti 