By: Parmanand Pandey, Advocate, Supreme Court (Secretary General IPC)
Markandey Katju, a former judge of the Supreme Court of India, is a well- known megalomaniac. One often wonders how a person of such deranged mental faculties managed to become the judge of the High Court and then got elevated to the Supreme Court.? As a judge of the Supreme Court, everybody used to laugh at his idiotic comments. He has not delivered any judgement, which could be said to be a landmark and have any citationary value.
Anyway, after his retirement, he managed to become the Chairman of the Press Council of India and always tried to browbeat the members as if he was still a judge of the Supreme Court.
On one occasion he is reported to have said that most of the journalists were fools. He has had the same opinion about politicians as well. On another occasion, he came out with an outlandish statement that majority of Indians were idiots.
He boasts that he has been a voracious reader and a book worm, which he certainly is. But it is equally true that he lacks his own mind. He is often found to be giving simplistic solutions to the problems that people laugh at him. In law, he will frequently quote Jeremy Bentham, JS Mill, Roscoe Pound, HLA Hart etc. to impress upon others.
His idiocies are innumerable. He will lecture on secularism, tried to prove Neta ji Subhash Chandra Bose and Mahatma Gandhi as the agents of the Britishers. He comes out with his hair-brained idea of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh again becoming one country.
This shameless man says that he is a Kashmiri Brahmin but takes proud of being a beef eater.
Now he is said to have written a blog in which he has opined that Hindi has no ‘Dum’ to compete with Urdu. This halfwit has no understanding of Hindi, although he comes from Prayagraj, which has been the hub of Hindi language and literature. This shows that this imbecile has not read Hindi books at all and to prove his point, like a dolt, he translated any couplet of Faiz Ahmed Faiz into Hindi and jumps like a moron to exclaim that look how inferior Hindi is to Urdu.
Our intention is not to compare Hindi with Urdu, but the undeniable fact is that Hindi is miles ahead of Urdu. It appears that he has not read Prem Chand, Bhagawati Charan Verma, Yashpal, Rangeya Raghav, Ram Dhari Singh Dinkar, Ram Chandra Shukl, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, Jai Shankar Prasad Maithili Sharan Gupt, Surya Kant Tripathi Nirala, Sumitra Nandan Pant, Maha Devi Verma and score of others, what to say of Tulasi Das, the tallest amongst the tall.
While Urdu still remains a language of Shaireees (poems) and stories; Hindi has developed into a formidable language of science, technology, commerce, trade, law, agriculture, forestry, horticulture, literature, music and art etc. It has inexhaustible support of Sanskrit and innumerable dialects but those who are blinds they cannot see the reality. The day is not far away when Hindi will become the most popular and developed language of the world.
But even then, the nincompoops like Markandeya Katju will not be able to see the reality. But again, that is not the drawback of the great Hindi, but the fault lies in persons like Katju.