How strange it is to discover that to our honourable members of Parliament, Mother Teresa and Shah Rukh Khan are strangers. “Reference to a stranger” is the ground for expunging them from the record, two out of 206 such acts of invasive surgery in the last year. Like the Oxford English Dictionary, the book of unparliamentary expressions grows in volume every year. The addition of Indian-origin words like keema and papad to the dictionary are celebrated annually, but the inclusion in Parliament’s negative list of terms like dhokha (fraud, used by Parliamentary Affairs Minister Venkaiah Naidu) and chor (thief, by Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi) is excessively puritanical.
If similar curbs were applied to the Hindi pulp fiction and film industries, they would be asphyxiated. Many Hindi words proscribed in Parliament are widely recognised cinema titles. Pooja Bhatt’s Dhokha premiered in 2007, and chor is a popular component of titles like David Dhawan’s Chor Machaaye Shor and Mithun Chakraborty’s Nobel Chor. Interestingly, only one English word appears to have been expunged: joker. That’s surprising, since the salience of the language in India increases apace, and it is as expressive as Hindi.
