Bare to dare

From Delhi’s AI Summit to Maoris, protesters have put skin in the game

In a demonstration that raised both eyebrows and hackles, some members of Youth Congress gate-crashed the recent AI Summit in Delhi, and as a gesture of protest against issues ranging from what they perceived as an Indo-US trade proposal unfavourable to Indian farmers to growing unemployment among young people, performed a semi-striptease by doffing their shirts. This bare-to-dare demonstration sought to convey that they were getting hot under the collar about many of the govt’s policies and priorities and needed to get their grievances off their chests, along with items of clothing.

Some have likened this show of pique by literally losing one’s shirt at the powers-that-be to the Mahatma’s removal of his top garment of made-in-Britain fabric to launch his homespun charkha movement in an opening gambit eventually to throw off the yoke of oppressive imperialism. Officialdom, however, has denounced the demonstrators saying that those who in public discard their kameez show a lack of tameez, and by taking panga by going nanga have disgraced not only themselves but national honour by their unseemly behaviour in front of distinguished foreign guests.

While losing one’s shirt in games of chance or on horse racing tracks is an occupational hazard for punters, metaphorically renouncing the garment in question can help win political brownie points. Juan Perón, who served two terms as President of Argentina, and was the husband of the charismatic Evita of musical fame, owed his rise to power thanks to the backing of the ‘descamisados’, Spanish for ‘the shirtless ones’, the hypothetical lack of wardrobe referring to their entrenched poverty as underpaid labourers for the ‘estancieros’, the large landowners who were the elite of the country.

The AI Summit protesters may or may not have heard of the descamisados, of the ‘sans culottes’, without knee-breeches, the working-class supporters of the French Revolution who substituted the aristocratic attire of knee-length breeches for ankle-length pantaloons.

Fortunately, however, the shirtless ones at the Summit seemed unfamiliar with the Maori way of showing dissent called ‘mooning’, which consists of lowering one’s nether garment and presenting one’s exposed rear in explicit body language summing up a literally bum deal.

END OF ARTICLE