The Language of Power

It began with a car door opening into traffic. Near Bengaluru’s Tin Factory junction, early one morning, Squadron Leader Madhumita Dutta stepped out of her vehicle, inadvertently hitting a passing two-wheeler. Her husband, Wing Commander Shiladitya Bose, was beside her. The man on the bike was Vikas Kumar, a delivery executive navigating the tangle of the city’s dawn. What followed was the kind of roadside altercation that usually flares and fades. Except this time, it didn’t. This time, it became a national spectacle.

From there, the encounter unwound with the volatile choreography of Indian street life. Accusations, gestures, a crowd. Voices raised in a city still not quite awake. Before long, there would be fists. There would be a video. There would be hashtags.

By mid-morning, the story had acquired national resonance. Bose, an officer with the Indian Air Force, uploaded a video showing himself with a bloodied face, claiming he had been assaulted because he didn’t speak Kannada. He had asked the gathered crowd why no one intervened to protect him and his wife. The question hung in the air like tear gas: Is this how Karnataka treats people who serve the nation?

In a country perpetually bristling with grievances—religious, linguistic, regional—his framing found quick traction. Here was a serviceman, bloodied in a southern city, for the apparent sin of not knowing the local tongue. Here was a national story of betrayal in the provinces.

And yet, as so often in such stories, the narrative soon began to slip its leash. CCTV footage from a nearby camera appeared to show a different sequence: the Wing Commander, after an initial exchange, pins the delivery boy to the pavement and strikes him multiple times. The police, called to investigate, issued a statement saying this was a case of road rage, not regional chauvinism. The FIR that followed named Bose as the accused—booked under grave sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, including an attempt to commit a life-endangering offence.

Even so, the question lingered: why was the first story—the one in which the powerful man is also the victim—so easy to believe?

Bose’s version of events wasn’t just a plea for sympathy. It was an invocation of a pattern many Indians already feel they recognise: the story of the Hindi speaker made unwelcome in a linguistically assertive south. It is a narrative with its own internal logic, fed by memories of anti-Hindi agitations, signage disputes, and contested school curriculums. But it also trades on something subtler: the expectation that the Hindi-speaking, north-Indian, male professional body—particularly when clad in military association—is the rightful protagonist of the national story.

When a uniformed officer says he was attacked for not knowing Kannada, the presumption is not just of truth but of moral correctness. His identity aligns neatly with symbols of nationhood. He must be in the right. The delivery executive, by contrast, is a hazy figure—unnamed at first, indistinct, uncredentialled. He is an accessory to the narrative, until the footage suggests otherwise.

The claim that language was at the heart of the altercation was powerful not because it was true or false, but because it fit into a larger anxiety—that India’s pluralism is becoming unruly, even inhospitable. But what the video reveals, more than anything, is the asymmetry of power.

When men in uniform bring their authority into civilian space, that authority can be disorienting. A military officer is not a private citizen in the way others are; the very notion of training, of bearing, of responsibility, confers upon him a symbolic weight. The same gesture—an accusation, a complaint, a video—lands differently when it comes from him. He speaks with the voice of the centre.

But the city of Bengaluru is not the centre. It is many things—a tech hub, a linguistic crossroads, a patchwork of Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, English, and Urdu—but it is not a neutral stage. The delivery executive, Vikas Kumar, is part of its subterranean economy, the invisible infrastructure that makes the city work. He does not carry the imprimatur of the state. His safety does not come pre-guaranteed.

This is not to suggest that Bose’s claim was made in bad faith. People experience conflict through the prism of their own fears, and in the frictional context of Indian urban life, miscommunication can metastasise in seconds. But what is also clear is that there is a subtle privilege in being able to say, in the wake of an altercation, I was assaulted because I don’t speak Kannada. That framing requires the assumption that Hindi is the norm, and that its absence must be defended or punished. For millions of Indians—especially in the gig economy—language is not a symbol of belonging or betrayal. It is simply the next order, the next instruction, the next voice on the phone. In the end, perhaps the most revealing detail is not in the altercation, but in the afterlife of the video. How quickly it spread, and how willingly it was accepted.

Bengaluruhome deliveryIAFroad rageVikas KumarWeb ExclusiveWing Commander Shiladitya Bose