INDIA RAPED!

BY SUNNY THOMAS

‘If they don’t have bread, let them eat cake?’ Who said this, India’s own Home Secretary! India is being raped everyday by bureaucrats who are contemptuous of hapless rape victims, and laud the Delhi police whose criminal lethargy caused the rape in a moving bus in the first place, and whose inept handling of the student crowd forms the worst case study in police mismanagement. Any demand for justice should begin with replacing the Home Secretary and the Police Commissioner to send the right message.  

Dr Manmohan Singh is the Prime Minister for Multinationals and Foreign Direct Investors, whose welfare and profitability he is duty-bound to protect. Rape is a purely domestic phenomenon, and a rape here and a rape there do not make economic sense, and are not even statistics. So don’t expect the Prime Minister to be unduly alarmed and, in all probability, this rape would have passed on as another rape. 

Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde who was projected as the  ‘Man of the Match’ by our television channels in the Ajmal Kasab hanging is preoccupied with brightening his Pakistani counterpart’s image in India, presumably for better neighbourly relationship. In the diplomatic world, nothing is more futile than holding a dialogue with Pakistan, as dialogue after dialogue proves it.  They provide no more than photo ops (opportunities) for television channels.  

The extreme cruelty with which the girl was raped and a metal rod inserted in her private parts damaging her intestine leaves no room for debate on capital punishment. The crime reminds one of a medieval mindset demanding barbaric punishment. The appointment of Justice J S Verma to head the Judicial Commission to look into the whole gamut of rape and the conduct of the police gives hope of a fair trial. 

Had  the student leaders sought an appointment with the President and presented him a charter of demands while the crowd peacefully demonstrated at India Gate, events would have moved more meaningfully. The attempt undeniably was to bypass the PM to approach the President, giving clearly the evidence of an ideological bent of mind. As street politics is becoming the popular brand of every agitator, care must be taken by the organisers not to let others hijack the agitation for their propaganda. If the first day’s demonstration was peaceful , the second day’s demonstration turned into an agitation with some publicity-hungry desperados bringing thousands of their followers for a battle.  History has shown again and again that all popular movements end up in the hands of the unscrupulous, turning a noble cause into a subaltern orgy.  

Some ideologues want to keep alive the climate of agitation till the next general election. The Anna Hazare movement fizzled out; Arvind Kejriwal is on a holiday; and they want the students to continue the agitation as long as the fire in the belly lasts. How long will it lasts is anybody’s guess. The television editors who called the Anna Hazare Movement a spontaneous one is now calling the student demonstration, too, a spontaneous movement  – nothing is farther from the truth. Racing constantly against time and other television channels, they court spontaneity and constantly err on the side of the truth. They interpret news in a labyrinth of assumptions and presumptions that do not represent the ground reality. You need to watch several channels to get a picture of the ground reality.  

The redeeming feature of the student demonstration is that it has shaken up the rapist – the scam-tainted politician, the contemptuous bureaucrat, the trigger-happy cop, the power-brokers and middlemen looting the nation. These are the true rapists who deserve capital punishment. Hang them along with the rapists of the girl in the moving bus so that democracy is made safe!