The PM of India is often characterised as hardline – usually by lazy journalist and religious fanatic PM of Pakistan – who cannot utter a Tweet without invoking religion into politics. It is because the people who became his countrymen wanted religion in politics that they left India.
Over the past half century India has fought wars with each of her neighbours, but has not waged war upon her own people who attack the weakest in society. Whilst it is called a Hindu Nationalist Government. Or a Government of Hindutva.
That is portrayed as striking fear into the hearts and minds of minorities I am told. It should. If those minorities are rapists and murders of women. If those minorities are village elders who order rape. IF those minorities are men who gang rape.
Yet again, another woman has died this past week from injuries suffered from a gang rape.
If those minorities are men who attack their wives. They should well fear the Government. All these Indian minorities should be afraid. They say the Government will not be liberal. They are right. We must not be liberal with finding rapists, with capturing rapists, with punishing rapists. They must not be liberal with the police forces and the judges who do not take rape seriously. All those expecting the Government to be so liberal should be disappointed.
They say the Government will be hardline. That a simple chai-walla not of the calibre of a PhD from Cambridge University as the previous PM will be harsh. They should be right. A simple man should know the biggest problem facing India is not the interest rate, or the trade deficit or the current account balance, experts far knowledgeable than he can be hired to think on those problems.
The biggest problem for a chai-Walla is to solve is how to stop our sisters, daughters and mothers being raped. A PhD from Cambridge will not give you the answer to that. But the common men and women have a few ideas born of harsh common sense.
So the Government pledge to you has to be, in this the land of Ram and Sita, where the most noble of all the revered Gods of this ancient land strove to save his wife from evil, a ‘Hindu Nationalist’ is compelled by belief, by values and doctrines to commit to saying here and now: we will rid the country of sex slavery and rape crimes.
