Two months after his right palm was chopped off by Muslim fanatics for allegedly insulting Islam's prophet in a question paper, a lecturer in Kerala has now been sacked by the diocese which runs the college. That's a classic case of what you would call adding insult to injury. Old proverbs wreaked anew.
Fr Thomas Malekudy, manager of Newman College, Thodupzuah, where TJ Joseph had been a selection grade senior lecturer at the Department of Malayalam, on Saturday announced the decision to remove him from service after an in-house inquiry. The management felt that he had hurt the religious feelings of a community by framing the controversial question resulting in loss of goodwill for the Church and even leading to law and order problems.
The supposedly blasphemous question was set by Joseph in the Malayalam semester examination paper for BCom students. It was based on a short story by CPI(M) leader PT Kunju Mohammed about a village madcap who questions god. The students were asked to punctuate a passage from the story. But the nameless mad man in the story was referred to as Mohammed by Joseph in the paper.
The local edition of the Jamaat-e-Islami’s newspaper promptly carried an explosive report insisting that Joseph had insulted the prophet. The Campus Front, the student wing of the Popular Front of India (PFI), picked up the thread and launched an agitation. And all hell broke loose.
Soon after the question paper controversy erupted in March, the Kothamangalam Catholic diocese (management) had suspended Joseph from service pending an inquiry. He had, however, been reinstated in late July after he duly apologised and was also booked by the police for “creating religious hate”.
But on July 4, when he was returning from Sunday Mass with his sister and aged mother, a seven-member gang armed with sharp weapons waylaid his car. He was assaulted, and his right palm was chopped off and thrown away. The attack was linked to PFI activists. There have been arrests, but the probe has not made any headway. Neither the PFI nor its political arm, the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI), condemned the incident.
The 52-year-old lecturer has now been dismissed from service. While the dismissal notice was served at his house at Muvattupuzha in Ernakulam district, Joseph was away in a Kochi hospital undergoing physiotherapy. His palm had been recovered and surgically sewn shortly after the attack. His dismissal means he can't claim pension even after close to 25 years of service.
The attack on Joseph had not evoked much outrage outside the state. His dismissal hasn't provoked much either, so far. The same Left-liberal intellectuals and journalists who never let go abegging any incident inflicted by the Saffron Brigade, can never find the right words to condemn an act of violence by Islamists. Or irrational decisions, such as this, taken by the Church.
If that isn't intellectual duplicity, what is?
