Column | Naughty politics – The Hindu

Politicians have to have thick skins because name-calling and insults have always been a part of the game.

Winston Churchill was a master at them. He called fellow U.K. prime minister Clement Atlee a “modest man with much to be modest about”. Texas governor Ann Richards famously described then U.S. vice-president George H.W. Bush as having been “born with a silver foot in his mouth”. Even former U.S. president Joe Biden got a zinger in when he said: “Rudy Giuliani — there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11.” Now we live in the age of full-fledged insult politics. U.S. President Donald Trump has turned insults into a cottage industry of sorts — ‘Sleepy Joe’, ‘Lying Ted’, ‘Crooked Hillary’. India too has had its share in recent years: ‘Pappu’, ‘Chaiwala’, ‘Tukde Tukde Gang’, ‘Maunmohan Singh’.

But no one expected “naughty Home Minister” to become the insult du jour. And it has catapulted to the top of the memes.

When the Enforcement Directorate raided the offices of I-PAC, a political consultancy firm in Kolkata, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee was up in arms. She told the media, “The nasty Home Minister, the naughty Home Minister who cannot protect the country. He is taking away all my party documents.”

That had the country chortling but ‘naughty man’ or ‘dushtu lok’ has a special space in Bengali hearts. It’s an insult, but can hardly be called anti-national. Dushtu lok sounds innocuous, almost like child’s play. Even the most diehard troll cannot go after anyone for calling someone “naughty”.

The vanishing people

My own father was nicknamed ‘Naughty’ by my aunt because she was peeved he had “stolen” my mother via marriage. That nickname stuck all his life much to the mystification of everyone else who knew him as a very polite, soft-spoken bhadralok.

Naughty sounds cutesy, like something out of an Enid Blyton book like The Naughtiest Girl in the School. But in Bengali, dushtu lok or ‘naughty man’ is an insult of some pedigree. Of Tagore and Ray pedigree, in fact.

Rabindranath Tagore wrote a poem called ‘Dushtu’ (Naughty) where a child complains his mother calls him “dushtu” while every other Tom, Dick or Harry aka Nilu, Yatish, Satish is good. In the most popular collection of Bengali fairy tales, Thakurmar Jhuli, the tuntuni tailor bird has to outsmart the “naughty vizier”. In the Satyajit Ray film Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress), the villains push Dr. Hajra, a parapsychologist, down the hillside in Rajasthan. When Mukul, the young boy accompanying them, asks what happened to him, they pretend it was a magic trick. The “dushtu lok”, they claimed, had just vanished. Of course, they were the real dushtu lok in the film, not the hapless Dr. Hajra.

In 2012, right after Mamata Banerjee had come to power in West Bengal, “dushtu lok vanish” hit the headlines. A cartoon appeared showing Banerjee talking to her party colleague, also named Mukul (Roy) like the boy in Sonar Kella. And in a cheeky take-off on Ray’s lines, this Mukul says “dushtu lok vanish” and their party colleague Dinesh Trivedi, whom Banerjee had just unceremoniously ousted as Railways Minister, vanishes. The cartoon hit the headlines when an academic at Jadavpur University was arrested because he had forwarded it to some members of his housing society.

In a climate where freedom of expression is under attack worldwide, the story of that offending cartoon is now just a half-forgotten blip. But dushtu lok lives on, lurking around us like naughty ghosts ready to unleash mischief. Banerjee was following an old cultural tradition as she summoned up the spectre of a dushtu lok. If the Home Minister was dushtu, she by definition had to be its opposite.

Ocean of goodness

The opposite of a dushtu lok, is a goodboy (or goodgirl). And in our heads, it’s usually one word, just like “goodjob”. This is a category I have some expertise in. In school, I won Good Conduct medals much to my mother’s delight. It went perfectly with the side parting in my hair, the handkerchief in my pocket, the black-rimmed spectacles. Now it makes me cringe to think I was one of those annoying children held up by other mothers as a “goodboy”.

My mother stashed the medals in a locker, not because they were worth much, but because a burglar might think they were. When I moved to America as a student, I was not just trying to get a degree, I was probably trying to put an ocean between me and that good conduct medal.

So, if any dushtu lok, of any political stripe, wants to turn over a new leaf, I have a good conduct medal or two I can offer as a reward. But I suspect there will be many takers in a nasty world.

The writer is the author of  Don’t Let Him Know, and likes to let everyone know about his opinions, whether asked or not.

Published – January 16, 2026 02:41 pm IST