The Hookerworm Infestation

The national motto of India is Satyameva Jayate, Truth Will Prevail. It’s inscribed at the base of the national symbol, the Asoka Pillar.

A better version of the symbol would be Hypocrisy Will Prevail. Since I don’t speak Sanskrit, I can’t render that in the proper words. Excuse me.

The latest manifestation of said hypocrisy was the decision of the Indian Foreign Ministry to direct our embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, to crack down on visas granted to Ukrainian women aged 15 to 40 on the grounds that they include “numerous prostitutes in search of a job”.

This being, you understand, a country where lawmakers watch porn in the state assemblies, and local trains and newspapers run ads for escort agencies and “private massage”, and big cities have large and well-established sex industries, ranging from sleazy brothels to high-class call girls walking the corridors of power. This also being a country which is the first to scream “discrimination” and “racism” against any critical comment, and any action elsewhere in the world that might even tangentially involve India or Indians negatively is taken up as a national affront. (For instance, this is a country where children are routinely mistreated and virtually considered their parents’ property, and nobody blinks an eyelash; but this is the same nation which was exercised recently because authorities in Norway removed two children from their Indian parents and placed them in care because the parents didn’t meet Norwegian child-care norms.)

This is also the nation which allegedly tries to promote tourism, and which has a substantial inflow of Ukrainian tourists every year, especially to Goa. Obviously, tourists don’t exactly decide on the basis of age and sex when choosing a destination, and young women don’t necessarily think they should have a male escort in order to visit someplace if they want. And with more and more women earning independent incomes, there’s no reason why they should.

It’s not as though there are no Ukrainian (or Russian, or other Eastern European) hookers in India. But there are also hookers, and sundry other criminals, including the Mafia, from plenty of other nations, including those favoured ones in the Western Hemisphere to which our rulers never miss an opportunity to genuflect. I don’t see them cracking down on visas issued to denizens of the European Union nations or the Zionazi pseudostate just because plenty of them are involved in drug smuggling among other pleasant little activities.

Oh, can you say “hypocrisy”?

So a Ukrainian women’s group, Femen, decided – quite rightly, in my opinion – that they had been insulted by the de facto Indian claim that any woman between the ages of 15 and 40 is a potential prostitute. (Can you even imagine the ruckus if the Ukrainian embassy had said anything remotely similar about Indian women? You can? Good.) So four of them broke into the Indian embassy, staged a topless protest (Femen is rather well known for this) on the balcony, and threw the Indian flag on the ground, waving anti-Indian banners the while.

The right-most poster reads "Arse to India". Ukrainians are amateurs at abuse.

Oh, horrors. Insulting the Indian national flag on top of everything. We must make war on Ukraine at once!

In a nation where the average cricket fan slathers the colours of the flag on his face and then acts in a manner not unlike a rabid ape, the national flag is something which is abused so routinely that if the poor thing was a conscious entity it would have died of shame long ago. And, anyway, a flag is just a piece of painted cloth, when all’s said and done.

I’ve often thought that Indians use outrage as a mask for insecurity, and hypocrisy as a default mode in daily life. Each little thing confirms me in this belief.

Let them who are without prostitutes cast the first stone.