Can you call a country a den of iniquity? I guess you can when a dictionary defines it as ‘a place where immoral or illegal things are done’. India, a subcontinent that is dominated by an outmoded caste system, a rape crisis incomparable elsewhere in the world, politicians with serious criminal records, a corrupt police force and an army that can rape, torture and pillage at will protected by an Armed Forces Special Powers Act. What the hell is this place even doing on the global stage?

With a billion dollar space programme and still receiving foreign aid handouts there is something completely skewed about this whole scenario.

Caste system

Two thirds of India’s population are disadvantaged and poverty is evident everywhere, no more so than in a system that has supposedly been outlawed but is so deep-rooted within the essence of their spirits that it is still forever extant.

The more urban India becomes the less once influential rural castes have a say and underneath them are the lower of the lowly castes, the ‘untouchables’. They are constantly oppressed and subject to violence and none more so than the ‘dalits’. Men with degrees are forced to work as their fathers did skinning cattle ‘chamars’ and if ordered to do so, must, according to societies misplaced law of order. Even the Dalai Lama has said ‘this is undemocratic, a feudal system and outdated’.  I would go further, it is a system still too far rooted to the so called ‘great’ and ‘epic’ fairy tales that support the majority of Indian Gods within their religions that glorify the suppression of the lower classes and vilification of women.

Rape crisis

The world was outraged in 2012 when Nirbhaya an intern on a bus was gang raped, beaten with iron bars, further raped with one of the rusted bars and died of her injuries. The death penalties handed out to her attackers have still not been fulfilled. Did all that outrage really make a difference? No.

37,000 rapes a year are reported in India, that’s one every 15 minutes. If one were to add in the imagined unreported figures the result would be harrowing.

Most cases are appalling, just Google them. A women raped in hospital hours after a C-Section,  young girls in villages raped and then hung from trees or burned by rapists covering their tracks. The latest causing outrage, an eight year old Muslim girl Asifa Bano kidnapped by Hindus, drugged and held in a Hindu temple where she was repeatedly raped by eight men before being beaten to death with a rock and her body dumped in a forest. Worse, if it really could be, four of the rapists were police officers and one a retired government official who even called his son from 300 miles away to come and satisfy his cravings of lust. Of course the son came running.

Religion could well be part of this last atrocity, with a cesspool of them, Hindu, Muslim, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism in the main, vying for recognition, rights and equality they simply do not get on well with each other but the problem goes much deeper and stems back to the caste system. Women are lower than men as far is India is concerned. Indian religions and their writings have no respect for women with the likes of the  ‘great’ Mahabharata, the Sanskrit epic on which much belief is based stating that  ‘Women are living lies’ and that ‘There is no creature more sinful, than woman. She is poison, she is snake’. This may well explain the disdain with which violence is meted out to women in India and some of the rapes, but why are the rapes increasing?

Narendra Modi, prime minister, is entrenched in the Hindutva ideology which is both militant and ultranationalist, unfortunately giving huge weight to teachings manufactured from India’s ‘great’ tomes of historical stories. Stories that are laden with rape and explicit sex where gods are exulted for such practice and therefore normalised in the minds of Indian men including:

• Between parents and children
• Between brothers and sisters
• With corpses
• With corpses of dead animals

(see Shaan Khan’s excellent article in the Daily Beast for more detail https://www.thedailybeast.com/whats-really-behind-indias-rape-crisis)

In a world that continues to modernise and, albeit slowly, remove the shackles of gender discrimination and acknowledge women’s rights, why are these people even allowed to sit on the same stage?

Corruption

India is listed as the most corrupt country in Asia in a Transparency International survey. With a bribery rate running at 69% it covers essential services such as police, ID documents, schools and hospitals. Hardly surprising when 31% of politicians in parliament have criminal cases against them ranging from attempted murder to assault and theft backed up by a police force where 62% of them take bribes.

Where rape is concerned, the police fair even worse. Blasé about rape, they remove offenders names to avoid arrest, hand victims back to their rapists, even pressuring some to marry their offenders or persuade them to come to a financial arrangement.

Foreign Aid

Why?

A simple question with a simple answer, stop giving it.

They don’t need it. Foreign governments can pontificate forever about the wonderful humanitarian good it does in poorer areas but the truth is the majority is there to further oil the links between businesses that make vast profits anyway or falls under the need for better security. Even the World Bank has stated that only 40% of grain handed to the poor in India reaches the right people.

This a country that spends billions on its space programme and has a GDP of 2.8 trillion dollars, not least because it has been so readily integrated into the world economy, but still receives foreign aid!

The UK are one of the worst offenders, deceiving its own voters into thinking that foreign aid to India had ended in 2015/2016 but it hasn’t. £70 million has been given to India since then, apparently for ‘technical assistance’ and ‘development capital investment’. Trying explaining what that means! Perhaps more worrying is that the Dfid (Department for international development) has over £756 million of its portfolio invested in India.

It is about time India was taken out of the world equation, loses its seat at the G-20, foregoes all foreign aid until it can guarantee its humanitarian spend and shows it does have a moral compass.

We don’t actually need anything from India, everything they produce can be bought elsewhere. There are many hard working activists trying to change things but it is not enough, taking away that which lines the coffers of the rich and corrupt unless they move now to change outdated attitudes might make them sit up and pay more attention. International outrage is never enough, it becomes old news too quickly as other events on the world stage happen. Sanctions happen over the blustering of war, how about over what is close to nothing short of the degradation of women, manipulation of the poor and the corruption of basic human rights.

Oh, and the cow.

Hindu beliefs that as the cow provides life sustaining milk it is a mother and therefore a goddess jar strongly against the fact that a mother is a women but then that gender is the lowest of the low. Kill the damn cows and feed the 190 million people recognised as starving across the country!