RAPE, LOOT & GOVERN!

BY SUNNY THOMAS

Arvind Kejriwal is on long leave. Anna Hazare has taken VRS. But if only Anna had fasted against rape and gang rape, he would still have remained an icon, and not a Charlie Chaplin.  

Mona Liza and Manmohan Singh have a mysterious face that puzzles the onlookers. One can never say from the Prime Minister’s face whether he is angry or is laughing. His face seldom betrays colours of emotions. And he would easily be voted as India’s most insensitive Prime Minister, judging from the trigger-happy way his government hikes fuel prices, bringing tear to every eye, which Jawaharlal Nehru famously said he wanted to wipe away as Prime Minister.

Even at the end of his second term, Manmohan Singh has no idea why he was elected Prime Minister. Looking for a rare species of Honest Man among Congressmen, Sonia Gandhi zeroed in on him. Under his impeccable image of integrity, all scamsters built a Taj Mahal in their backyard – be it mines or spectrum. 

The same insensitivity was in evidence when India’s Home Secretary lauded criminal policing in Delhi, which set the stage for the demonic rape in a moving bus  – it is certain the rapists were demons incarnate, not human beings. Again, the same insensitivity was in evidence when the police fired water cannons, and lobbed tear-gas shells and rained lathi-charge on the people who gathered to protest against the rape.  

The same insensitivity was in evidence when the rapists plunged the metal bar into the most sensitive part of the human body. And again, the same insensitivity drove the passersby – motorists, scooterists and  ‘auto-rists’ – becoming spectators and not Good Samaritan.

Dr Manmohan Singh is only the symbol (not the creator) of political insensitivity. There is judicial insensitivity, bureaucratic insensitivity, academic insensitivity, medical insensitivity, and people’s own insensitivity to account for. We live in a culture of insensitivity, where others are disposable commodities and us the centre of the universe. What happened in Delhi is the symptom.     

The raging debate of the 1960s was between morality and freedom – those who argued for censorship on violence and sex on the screen, and those avant-garde movie makers who wanted total freedom to create the Frankenstein’s monster they loved to produce for the box-office. It took pure common sense to foresee violence and sex on the screen would affect the psyche of the youth. Opion-makers sided with movie-makers and freedom won. What we see today is a lustful society fed ad nauseam on sex, violence and crime.

To make matters worse, came the Internet which is a boon for the true knowledge-seeker . And a curse for society for its diabolical misuse. Not only some MLAs of the Karnataka Assembly but even teenagers stealthily watch porn, hard and soft, in the comfort of their rooms at home and in hostels. If so much sex goes into the head, out will come rape and gang rape. Teenagers raping their cousins is common but less shocking than fathers raping their own childen!

Students raping their teachers for poor marks awarded and teachers raping their 

students for excellent performance are only waiting to happen. 

We live in a jungle of freedom, euphemistically called Democracy, which gives on a platter the freedom to destroy itself and all other freedoms. Even the freedom to destroy our civilisation and  Our Planet! The solution lies in unmaking and remaking the society, which is beyond the ken of any government. It calls for creative destruction and remaking on the bedrock of morality. Only a leader of intrinsic worth can accomplish it – not desperados seeking television publicity.