Despatches from Hindunazistan: The Wind Beneath Their Wings

So what’s been going on in the great Republic of Hindunazistan since I sent you the last despatch from the front lines?

Plenty, of course; so much that I won’t even bother with most of it, entertaining as it might be, with tales of state elections involving prima donna politicians – believe me, Indian politicians can put Donald Trump to shade in egotism without even trying – or the travails of so-called sports stars, heat waves and the like. This particular Despatch will confine itself to discussing two major “scandals” which have consumed media time and attention over the last couple of months, and which, as we’ll see, are indirectly connected.

The first is the saga of Kingfisher Airlines.

[Image Source]

Until the so-called “economic liberalisation” of the early 1990s, India had first two, and then three, state-owned airlines: Air India, which serviced the overseas routes, Indian Airlines, which flew domestically (and to a couple of heavily travelled destinations in the vicinity, such as the Persian Gulf and Nepal) – and Vayudoot, an ill-starred attempt at a feeder airline serving smaller destinations, such as in eastern India. But with “economic liberalisation”, while Vayudoot, er, crashed and burned, and Indian Airlines was forcibly merged with Air India, a whole mess of other privately owned airlines entered the fray. A lot of them, naturally, failed. At least one, Jet Airways, thrived, and continues to thrive, but its finances were, and are, murky in the extreme. There have been multiple and repeated accusations that Jet is a Mafia money-laundering scheme, but for some strange reason no Indian government seems at all eager to take a look at this. You’d almost imagine that Jet’s owners (or “alleged owners” as one critic put it) are paying off successive regimes to look the other way, but that surely can’t happen, can it? I mean, Indian politicians can’t possibly be corrupt, can they? Of course not!

As the initial bloodletting among the private airlines subsided, and the field stabilised a little, one Vijay Mallya decided that he wanted to get into the business as well. Mallya was the heir to a brewery empire – United Breweries, which makes Kingfisher Beer – and also a politician, with a seat in the Upper House of the Indian Parliament and multiple cronies across the political spectrum. He, of course, needed money to start this airline, which was to be called Kingfisher, just like the beer. To get this money he approached the nationalised Indian banks for loans.

Now, this might be surprising to you, but normally banks aren’t all that eager to lend money unless they’re more than certain they’re going to get it back. If I – and I am a perfectly solvent citizen with a criminal record comprising two parking tickets – were to go asking for a loan, as I have had to on a couple of occasions, they’d check my credit rating, my tax returns, and my projected future income back, front and sideways before telling me they’d be able to lend me a fraction of the amount I’d asked for. And that’s even though I am a qualified dentist and the loans I was asking for were entirely to do with running my clinic.

Not so for Mallya. Even though he had no, zero, experience of running any kind of airline, the banks seemed to have absolutely no problems pouring in money. Soon enough, he bought a fleet of planes, hired staff by enticing them away from other airlines with much greater salary offers, and started flying operations. And in order to make his airline stand out from among the others, he started offering things that none of the rest did, such as paying for booking on other airlines if one of his passengers missed a flight. And in order to keep his employees happy, he continued to pay them more than anyone else, invited them all to gala parties, and the like.

All this, of course, was on the money he’d borrowed from the banks. Please remember this.

The airline business, contrary to what a lot of people might imagine, is actually extremely capital-intensive, and almost all earnings are ploughed right back into keeping things going. I’ve read that the profit margin can be as low as 3%. Therefore, if one starts out by increasing one’s expenses far beyond the competition, one must be able to compensate by increased income, or one will be faced with bankruptcy. And with the strictly limited paying capacity of the Great Indian Muddle Class, one can’t increase income beyond a very small limit because the customer will simply choose the cheaper alternatives. This is only logical; it doesn’t need an airline executive to figure it out.

But, apparently, this was beyond the cognitive capacity of a beer baron.

By the mid-2000s, then, Kingfisher Airlines was so far into the red it would have been time to man the exits. But instead of restructuring and taking a hard look at his business model, Mallya apparently decided that the problem was that he wasn’t flying to enough destinations. Kingfisher Airlines, at that time, was only cleared to fly within the country; Mallya wanted international routes.

To do this, he decided to buy another airline.

The airline he decided on was Air Deccan. Air Deccan could be called the polar opposite of Kingfisher. Owned by a former airline pilot, Captain Gopinath, it was ruthlessly efficient, extremely cost-conscious, and provided a totally no-frills flying experience for its passengers, keeping them coming with fares below anyone else’s. But Air Deccan had one precious thing Mallya wanted – it had rights to fly to foreign destinations. So he made an offer Gopinath apparently found impossible to refuse, and bought the airline.

Once again, you do not buy an airline with the contents of your piggy bank. Guess where Mallya obtained the funds to purchase it?

Let’s play a little mind game. We’ll assume that you’re a moneylender whose livelihood depends on earning interest on finds you loan out. I come to you asking for money to set up a bread bakery, even though I have no idea how to make a loaf of bread. Without the slightest hesitation, you lend me the money I ask for.

After a couple of years, the bakery is on the rocks, earning so little that after paying staff salaries and my suppliers I have not enough left over to even start paying your loan back. Now, I decide that the solution to my problems is to buy another bakery, one which makes fancy cakes. I have failed at a business that depends on making bread, and now I want to make fancy cakes as well. Right.

So I come to you, demanding even more money to buy this cake baking business. What would be your response? You’re totally going to throw open your cash drawer and give me wads of currency notes, aren’t you? I think not.

Well, guess what happened with Kingfisher. I bet you can’t. Oh, wait, you can. Anyway.

Earlier, Kingfisher had signed an agreement with Deccan promising not to poach staff from it. Now, after buying the airline, Mallya promised that he wouldn’t lay off anyone, even though this would mean a considerable amount of duplication of personnel. How many separate sets of baggage handlers and check in counter staff does an airline need at one airport, anyway?

So this might have endeared Mallya to his new employees, but it did nothing to help Kingfisher to get out of the red. Of course, it did have those new international routes. They would make it money, right?

Wrong. On the international circuit, Kingfisher was suddenly faced with competition from the big boys, people like British Airways and the like. More than obviously, they weren’t keen to see their profits cut into by an upstart like Kingfisher. And, unlike Mallya, they had the financial resources to undercut the competition and wait for it to collapse.

Again – once again! – let me remind you that all this was happening on the money Mallya had borrowed from the nationalised banking sector. The taxpayer, in effect, was financing all this.

Also, let me remind you that Kingfisher Airlines was not Mallya’s main source of income. That remained United Breweries and Kingfisher Beer.

By now, though, the banks were at last becoming alarmed at Mallya’s failure to reimburse their loans. So they demanded he start paying them back, or else.

Or else what? As it turned out, what it meant was that or else the banks would enmesh themselves even more in the Kingfisher wreck.

This was the proposal Mallya made the banks: instead of paying back the loans, he would pay the banks back with shares in Kingfisher Airlines. A magnificent offer indeed!

Let’s again go back to my bakery. I can’t run a bread making business, I’ve just bought a cake shop on top of that, and you want your money back. I instead suggest that I give you a sleeping partnership in the (clearly failing) business. Would you accept?

Can you doubt that the banks did?

By 2012, Kingfisher had finally reached the end of the road. It could no longer pay the staff the extravagant salaries to which they’d grown accustomed. It abruptly declared a lockout, shut off the fund flow, and ceased flight operations. The shares with which Mallya had paid the banks became worthless scraps of electronic paper. The airline came to ground, a flaming wreck.

The impact of this was felt, of course, by the laid off staff only. Mallya himself had his cash flow from Kingfisher Beer and other business concerns coming to him uninterrupted. But his erstwhile employees had become so used to their inflated salaries, and so certain that they would continue uninterrupted, that a lot of them had taken to living well beyond their immediate income. They’d sent their children to the most expensive private schools, taken huge personal loans to buy swank houses, and the like. Now they were not only cut off from those funds, they couldn’t find jobs in the airline sector, which had suffered even further contraction. The children left the posh schools, the fancy houses went in distress sales, and several of them even committed suicide.

But none of this touched Mallya. He continued with the same old playboy lifestyle, being seen with the crème de la crème of society, and nobody raised a peep. That is, until early this year, when he made the tactical error of buying a professional cricket team. The media, on the lookout for a sensation, suddenly began asking on what basis he was buying this pro cricket team when he was so deep – to the tune of 90 thousand million rupees – in debt.

Try saying that to yourself, ninety thousand million rupees. Try imagining the zeroes. I’ll wait.

Mallya’s response was anger. His debts, he fumed, were a business between him and the banks. Nobody else had any right to talk about them. But his political connections were so well known, and the resentment against the moneyed class so high, that the media latched on to it like manna from heaven. The banks, too, finally began to find their voice and bleat for payment. The whole thing became a media circus, but the politicians, strangely, stayed totally silent.

They were so silent, in fact, that if only they hadn’t been obviously incorruptible and upright Indian politicians, you’d have thought they were terrified that Mallya had information on them that he was threatening to spill.

You’d have by this time thought it likely that Mallya was someone who had every reason in the world to run away from the country, and that the obvious thing to do would be to seize his passport – something eminently within the rights of the government – to prevent him from leaving. No such luck. On 4^th March, 17 banks, led by the State Bank of India (in which, by the way, I have an account) moved the Supreme Court to stop him leaving, and to have him arrested for the non-payment of the 90 thousand million rupees he owed. This was a pretty strange motion to make, seeing that Mallya had already left the country; he flew to Europe on 2^nd March...first class.

Is it a surprise that he'd sold his stake and taken a huge amount as severance pay, leaving his former employees high and dry?

Where in Europe did he go? Which is the world’s acknowledged refuge for financial criminals and oligarchs of all sorts, welcoming them and their ill gotten gains with open arms?

London, of course.

While the government was still expostulating that it was sure that Mallya would return, a journalist tracked him down in England and interviewed him. He claimed that he “hoped” that he would be able to return to India “someday”; anyone not totally brain dead would be able to deduce that this “someday” would never come.

Mallya’s case is, basically, a perfect illustration of the crony capitalist system, where robber barons are allowed to do as they wish with public funds in return for kickbacks to enabling politicians. If India chooses to embrace the capitalist system, it can’t complain when unscrupulous criminals get away with murder; in this case, the Kingfisher employees who were driven to suicide, for example. Capitalism rewards greed and punishes principles; and Mallya is the perfect product of that system. Possibly his only misfortune was that he’s Indian and not Amerikastani; in the latter instance he could have applied for a bailout from the blood soaked war criminal Barack Hussein Obama, and got it too.

Now here’s an interesting thing; books have been written, literally, about the fall of Kingfisher, and yet they somehow all manage to completely fail to mention this simple fact. So remarkable is this omission that I can’t see it as anything but deliberate. Criticism of the capitalist system is verboten in India today, except for Maoists and environmentalists, who are, as the government has repeatedly certified, enemies of the nation.

While in exile, and still making vague noises about returning in April, Mallya made an offer to return part (much less than half) of the loan amount to the banks. They turned the offer down. The government then, very late in the day, cancelled Mallya’s passport. It did no good, of course, in London; a place that shelters Russian oligarch crooks and Chechen jihadi terrorists won’t be in a hurry to throw out someone who has still immense personal funds at his disposal.

I am deliberately not suggesting that the Indian government sent back channel messages to Britain to not put Mallya on a plane back to India, even though, without a passport, he’d be an illegal resident in England. That would imply that the Indian government is not interested in getting him back to stand trial, which in turn means that the Indian government is complicit in his crimes and fraud. That couldn’t be, could it? Right?

After his passport was revoked, Mallya finally announced that he would never return to India, something that should have set the media afire, but didn’t; not a ripple. That was because by then the chattering heads on the telly were eagerly discussing something else entirely...

...the affair of the Augusta Westland Helicopter Deal.

[Image Source]

Before I begin on this, let me go over a little bit of recent history. You’ll see why this is important in a minute.

Currently, India is ruled by the Hindunazi BJP party of Prime Minister Narendrabhai Modi. It will be nothing new to readers of this blog when I repeat that I despise both the party and Modi himself; but I acknowledge that they genuinely won the last election, albeit with just 31% of the vote. Modi may be vile, and he may have betrayed all the dewy eyed expectations of his dupes, I mean voters – but he is a genuinely elected prime minister, and when he issues orders, said orders come from himself.

That was not the case, though, until 2014. From 2004 to 2014, for ten whole years, India was ruled by the Congress Party. The Congress was once genuinely socialist, though those days are long, long gone; today, though non-Hindunazi, it’s even more right wing than the BJP where Big Business is concerned. Also, the Congress is not really a political party; like most Indian parties except the Communists and some of the Hindunazi groups, it’s basically a private proprietorship.

The owners of the Congress are the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, currently represented by the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul. Though they own the party (quite literally – it’s an open secret that the party’s funds are held in their names), they found a handy way of not taking responsibility for the actions of the government their party led; when they won the election in 2004, they installed a pliant, rubber-spined nonentity, one Manmohan Singh, as prime minister. Manmohan Singh had only one thing to commend him: he was totally colourless, utterly without any charisma or ability, and had never, not even once, won any election in his life, not even at the municipal level. He therefore had no political base whatsoever, and could never, under any circumstances, emerge as a threat to the dynasty within the party. It was known to everyone that all orders given by Manmohan Singh were passed on to him by the dynasty; he himself was a rubber stamp in a blue turban, no more.

The point, therefore, is that anything done by him in an official capacity was merely as an instrument for the dynasty. This has to be kept in mind.

Now, in 2010, the Air Force, for reasons unknown, decided to purchase 12 helicopters for the specific purpose of transporting top government officials, including the president and prime minister. Why this purchase was decided on I’m sure I couldn’t tell you; all these decades the purpose was served perfectly well by Russian-built Mi 8 and Mi 17 helicopters, and there had never been any complaints about them. Suddenly, though, the air force needed a squadron of luxury VIP transports.

[Of course, I could suggest to you that the air force would never have decided on any such purchase without orders from the government, in fact could not legally have decided on any such purchase without orders from the government. I could then suggest to you that the “government” in this case was the Gandhi dynasty. But they’d just be hypothetical suggestions. Please don’t imagine I am accusing anyone! All Indian politicians, even if they were born in Italy, are pure as the driven snow!]

Having decided on the purchase of these machines, the air force then called for bids from manufacturers able to meet the specifications demanded. One of these specifications was a service ceiling of 6000 metres, presumably so that the big-shots being given rides in these planes could visit high-altitude Himalayan destinations. At a meeting called by the then Air Force chief, one Air Chief Marshal SP Tyagi, though, the decision was abruptly made to reduce the ceiling requirement from 6000 metres to 4500. That’s a whopping 25% reduction of the performance parameters, if you’re keeping track; not a matter of a minor adjustment.

Now, there was the Italian company Finmeccanica, which owns the Italian/British aviation company Augusta Westland. Its AW101 model was nowhere in the running for the contract as long as the ceiling requirement was 6000 metres; as soon as it was reduced to 4500, though, not only did it suddenly become eligible to bid, it magically won the contract at once!

Let me take a moment to remind the reader that this was under the Congress government, which is just a name for the Gandhi dynasty. Let me further remind the reader that Sonia Gandhi is of Italian origin, as is Finmeccanica. I would also venture to say that Italy is the country that keeps cropping up in political controversies in India, more than all other nations put together, ever since a (by the standards of the time) giant scandal over the purchase of Bofors howitzers by the army back in the late 1980s. An Italian crony of the Gandhis, Ottavio Quattrocchhi, was among those implicated in getting kickbacks from slush funds in the deal; the Gandhi dynasty helped him skip the country, and made sure he was never extradited back to face trial as long as he lived.

I am sure it’s a total coincidence that another Italian company should be involved this time round, though. Please keep in mind that I am totally not suggesting Sonia Gandhi used her power to influence the deal in favour of another Italian group. That would mean she was dishonest, and, of course, that can’t be true.

Now, the deal with Augusta Westland was signed in 2010. By early 2013, though a huge advance had been paid, not a single helicopter had been delivered. Manmohan Singh’s “government” was in dire trouble, staring at defeat in the elections due the following year. It was at that stage that a commission alleged massive bribery in the deal, with payoffs being made to, among others, SP Tyagi and his relatives. Finmeccanica’s CEO, one Giuseppe Orsi, was arrested in Italy on bribery charges, the government belatedly cancelled the contract with Augusta Westland, and arrested an infamous crooked arms dealer who had served as a middleman in the deal.

[Said arms dealer and his Romanian wife are incarcerated in Delhi’s Tihar jail, but apparently enjoy such facilities as candlelight dinners together every week. I can’t even recall when I last had a candlelight dinner, assuming I ever had one, unless it was when the power went out while I was eating. The perks of being a rich jailbird!]

And, remarkably, one day after the Central Bureau of Investigation submitted charges about the corruption in the deal in 2013, another middleman, a Brit called James Christian Michel, was allowed to escape the country. Isn’t it remarkable how people are magically permitted to leave in the nick of time? Quattrocchhi, Michel...Vijay Mallya?

Time passed. The Congress was wiped out in the 2014 elections, being reduced to just 44 seats. Modi took over among high hopes, and dashed them so quickly that his worshippers are still unable to believe their eyes. Meanwhile, Orsi was acquitted of bribery by a court in Italy, and it seemed that the Augusta Westland tale had reached a dead end.

That is, until now, when another Italian court overturned the acquittal of Orsi, and exposed a lot of dirt that had been ignored so far; including the fact that Augusta Westland had earmarked funds to influence air force officers and politicians to sway the deal in its favour. Among said politicians named by the court were several dynasty flunkies, not to speak of, oh heavens, Sonia Gandhi and her son themselves!

Can you doubt that the Hindunazis seized on this like a starving moderate cannibal headhunter leaping on a dead Syrian soldier’s heart?

Also, Augusta Westland seems to have earmarked funds to pay off the Indian media to “look the other way”, according to the Italian court. Apparently their silence was bought for three years, but the money has run dry now.

No tears need be wasted on the Congress, which, if you've been paying attention so far, you'll conclude is even more despicable than the Hindunazis. Its response has basically been bluster, meant for one purpose only – to protect the dynasty. All other considerations are secondary. The bluster has been spectacularly unsuccessful, but that doesn’t really matter since everyone knows perfectly well that nothing will come of it in the end. When everyone’s hand is in the till, if one thief gets punished, the other might get his hand chopped off tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the Hindunazis have used this opportunity not just to quietly bury the Kingfisher controversy, but to cover up their continuing agenda of anti-Muslim fascism. Indian writers in the Urdu language have been ordered to sign an oath of loyalty; apparently Urdu (one of the official languages of the Indian Union) is an anti-national language now. Why not simply, you know, ban it outright?

The next date to watch is 19^th May, when the results of multiple state elections will be declared. If the Hindunazis are successful, they will assume their tactics are working, and will continue with them. If, as I anticipate, they are badly defeated everywhere, they will conclude they are not being fascistic enough, and will intensify their campaign of hatred. The effete, corrupt Congress will in either case merely try to protect the dynasty, and wait for 2019 and a fresh shot at power.

This has been your latest report from Hindunazistan. Stay tuned for fresh bulletins as and when they become available.

The Delhi Rape and the Great Indian Muddle Class: Hypocrisy Hundredfold

Or,

IN WHICH I AM DISGUSTED ONCE MORE

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The hypocrisy of the Great Indian Muddle Class is a thing to behold.

Each time I come across it, each time I think that surely the Muddle Class can’t exceed this next time round, it does so routinely. Each time, without fail, the Muddle Class shows itself to be even more contemptible than one might imagine.

Three years ago I’d written about a particularly gruesome gang-rape in Delhi, which had inflicted such horrific injuries on the victim that she’d died in hospital several days later. That had set off a wave of “protests” across the country – “protests” which I’d characterised as not being directed at the rape itself, but at the simple fact that the perpetrators had been working-class village migrants and the victim had been of the Muddle Class. The victim – named “Nirbhaya” by the media, though her real name, Jyoti Singh Pandey, was an open secret anyone could have discovered with a ten second Google search – was turned into a kind of celebrity. And even though the law did not permit the death sentence to be applied to rape, the demand (this was before the victim died and the charge upgraded to murder) was for the rapists to be executed anyway.

As I’d said then:

It’s an absolute certainty that if the victim of the rape had been of the labourer set, there would have been as little reaction from the Muddle Class as there is when (as happens routinely) rich kids driving SUVs get drunk and crush homeless people to death. The Muddle Class doesn’t care about anyone but itself.

Accordingly, whatever the “protests” appear to be, they are not actually against the rapes – they are protests against the Muddle Class being made to feel vulnerable. No more, no less.

Sure enough, a year and a half later when two village girls, from the bottom layer of society, were gang raped and hanged to death – and the Great Indian Muddle Class scarcely turned a hair. The same people who had demanded the death penalty for the Delhi rapists didn’t stir a finger to even put up Fakebook status messages of sympathy. As I'd pointed out at the time, it was foreigners who were more disturbed than Indians.

Now, one of the perpetrators of the rape in Delhi in December 2012 was, at the time, a juvenile – 17 years old. Under Indian law as it now stands, offenders below the age of 18 are treated as juveniles, and, of course (like elsewhere in the world) are not subject to the same standards of punishment as adults. The media alleged – there is no independent confirmation of this whatsoever and therefore no reason to believe it – he was also the “most sadistic” of them all. Whether that is true or not – and, let me repeat, there is no reason to believe it is and plenty of reason to believe it is not – he was most certainly a juvenile at the time the crime was committed, and after detention of three years, his time of release came around at last.

Before I go any further, let me explain something clearly, in case someone thinks I’m condoning rape or excusing the criminal in this or any other case: I am not, actually, one of those who think that a criminal should get off lightly only on account of his age. It’s not as though at the age of 17 years 364 days, 23 hours and 59 minutes a person is a child, and, voila, 60 seconds later some kind of switch turns on in his head and he’s suddenly an adult. And it wouldn’t make any difference if the age at which one is to be considered a “juvenile” is reduced to, say, 16 years. There’s no switch that goes click.

(Incidentally, that’s a problem I have with voting as well; how does one seriously claim that a 17 year old is too young to understand the nuances of democratic choice, but just a year later magically does? I was politically aware at 14, and I know people in their sixties with the political knowledge of a chunk of rock.)

But the law is the law, and, besides, is a very well known law. It’s never been the case that people didn’t know that the age of being a juvenile is 18 or that juveniles are treated differently. And there’s never been any secret about the fact that once the three years of detention were up, the juvenile in this case would be released, or, to be more exact, would be placed in a programme with an NGO where his final status would be determined. No secret at all.

This is why what happened when the release date came around can only be described as a circus performance. The first was the decision by Jyoti Singh Pandey’s parents to declare her name to the world, saying that they had nothing to be ashamed of. This is of course true. They had nothing at all to be ashamed of. It wasn’t a stain on the girl’s morals that she was accosted on a bus, raped, brutalised, and ultimately murdered. But a simple question then arises: what exactly was holding the parents back from declaring the girl’s name to the world for the last three years, when she was being referred to in the media by such monikers as “Damini” or, much more frequently, “Nirbhaya”? As I said, her real name was no secret; it was known to the world from the start, and only those who actively didn’t want to know it could have avoided the knowledge. So why hold off for so long?

Perhaps because they wanted to catch the attention of the media and were waiting for the right time to come around?

That was just the start of the circus. As the release date grew closer, the “protestors” suddenly found their voice, brushed the dust off their placards, and demanded that the release be cancelled. On what legal basis this might happen, of course, they could not point out. All these years, they’d made no attempt to get the law changed to either lower the age of juvenility to 16, as they said they wanted, or to make certain crimes not applicable to the law. Even if they had done so, they could not have, as the Communist parliamentarian Brinda Karat pointed out, make it retrospective. You can’t punish a person for a crime he committed under a law which did not exist when said crime was committed. But of course the “protestors” ignored this.

In fact, what they really wanted is simple. They didn’t want a change in the law; that might have created problems for their own rich kids, who so frequently get roaring drunk at late night parties and run over, say, poor homeless people sleeping on the pavements. When that happens, or, similarly, when these kids rape poor women, then these same Muddle Class specimens are their first line of defence: they were “kids” who “didn’t know what they were doing” and the like. In this case, they certainly wanted no change in the law, which anyway wouldn’t have served their purpose; what they wanted in this instance was an exception to the law.

Can one say “hypocrisy”?

Three full days after the High Court passed down its verdict clearing the release of the juvenile (his name may or may not be Mohammad Afroz; I’ve not been able to confirm it), the “protestors” moved the Supreme Court, at midnight, to stop the release. There is, can be, absolutely no justification for this last moment, midnight appeal but theatricality. As even a Congress Party politician said, and this is one of the few instances when I find myself agreeing with a Congress politician on anything, it’s just “doing politics”. The Supreme Court, to its credit, did not stop the release, and the juvenile is no longer in custody now. It would have been a ludicrous pandering to the Muddle Class if an exception had been made to the law to suit its demands.

Even more ridiculously, a law is now supposed to be passed to bring down the age of juvenility to 16, but only for “heinous crimes”. What decides when a crime is “heinous”, I can’t tell you. From my own examination of death penalties in India, which are supposed to be restricted to the “rarest of the rare” cases, the only thing I could conclude is that one’s chances of being sentenced to death are dependent on one’s being (a) poor or (b) lower caste or Muslim. If one happens to be both poor and lower caste/Muslim, it’s just about a certainty, while the mega rich might not even be jailed for the same kind of offence.

Can one doubt that this will also be exactly what happens with the new law, assuming it is passed and the courts allow it to stand?

Let me make a prediction: Jyoti Singh Pandey’s parents are going to use her corpse as a stepping stone into politics. I won’t say that they have made any plans to do so yet, or that the idea has even entered their heads. But the idea has certainly entered someone’s head. Somebody is arranging and directing this circus, these so-called “protests”, with the full knowledge that they will be useless in their stated “aim” – to stop Afroz, or whatever his name is, from being released. Nothing of this kind happens by chance, and someone is determined to use it for gain. And the only kind of gain I can think of is political.

All we have to do is wait and see which political party turns this into a crusade, and snaps up the Pandeys as members. Then we’ll know. I'll bet you one of them will.

Readers might think I’m being too cynical. To which my response would be:

If you think I’m cynical, you don’t have much of a nodding acquaintance with reality, do you?

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[Note: I am leaving this article without any photographic illustration. I can't seem to find any which adequately conveys my disgust towards the Great Indian Muddle Class, which, of course, is my primary target here.]

#JeNeSuisPasCharlieHebdo

“A plague a' both your houses!” ~ Mercutio, Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 1 (William Shakespeare)

By now, with the deluge in the media, everyone and his or her uncle, dog and pet rat knows that the office of the so-called satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was attacked in Paris a couple of days ago, and twelve people (as of this writing) killed. 

Didn't someone see these guys dressed like that and get suspicious?

The perpetrators, we are told, were a trio of “Islamists”, of whom one has since “surrendered” (he claims to have an alibi) while the other two, alleged brothers, are, also allegedly, as of this writing, holed up in a building somewhere.

Why do I say “alleged”? It’s because as of this writing there’s still no proof that the people who committed the crime are “Islamists” (whatever that term means). They allegedly helpfully identified themselves and even more helpfully left behind a car full of flags, Islamic “literature” and an identity card. Well, they might have. It happens. But it’s also – only just – possible that they might be someone else pretending to be Muslim terrorists. This hypothesis has got some traction online, with a lot of people accusing various actors, from the French government to the Zionists, of being behind the murders. Some people even posit that there were no murders, and everyone was an actor, just like “at Sandy Hook”.

This isn’t the place to go into a discussion of why people are so reluctant to believe the obvious, and spin incredibly detailed, and increasingly fantastical, conspiracy theories to justify their viewpoints. But the simple fact is that they do, and the more evidence emerges to counter their viewpoint, the more obstinately they cling to it.

I suppose there is a chance – a very, very slight chance – that the Zionist murder organisation Mossad attacked the Charlie Hebdo office in order to sabotage France’s rapprochement with the Palestinians. (I’d want to know, though, why they didn’t set off a...truck bomb in a shopping district or something in that case. It would be much more effective.) I suppose it might be that the French government either had its own secret service attack the office, or faked the whole thing, in order to, I don’t know, clamp down on its own people’s domestic rights. I suppose Osama bin Laden’s ghost might have summoned zombies to do it as well. But, unless evidence is presented, I do not believe it.

Therefore, for the purposes of this article, I will take it as fact that a small group of jihadist Muslims attacked the Charlie Hebdo office. They may or may not be Cherif and Said Kouachi, the alleged “terror brothers”, and they may or may not have acted alone. But, as I will shortly discuss, it hardly matters if they did – the current situation in France, and the actions of the French government, made this kind of attack inevitable.

But why would “Islamists” want to attack Charlie Hebdo in particular? Well, this so-called satirical magazine (which has a humongous circulation of all of 60,000 from what I’ve been told) has made a career out of insulting, among other things, the Prophet Muhammad, the Koran, and Islam in general. It’s also racist, homophobic, anti-Jewish, and, in the words of this article, “no...decent person...could react with anything other than revulsion” at some of the material passed off as “satire” in its pages.

For instance, and I’m deliberately choosing something which is not gratuitously offensive to any religion, here’s Charlie Hebdo on the schoolgirls Boko Haram kidnapped in Nigeria. Remember those kids, about whom such an outcry was made a few months ago before mysteriously sinking without a trace once the Nigerian government turned down foreign troops? According to Charlie Hebdo, those poor schoolgirls turned sex slaves are, wait for it, welfare queens.

[There are more Hebdo "cartoons" on that site for your consideration, and I strongly recommend that you check out the commentary, which I endorse completely and unreservedly.]

Source

This isn’t an expression of free speech. To borrow an inelegant American word, it’s douchebaggery.

Nor is this, by any means, the first time Charlie Hebdo was targeted, either. In 2011, after another cartoon targeting Muhammad, its office was fire-bombed, though nobody was, fortunately, killed or wounded at the time.

Whoever attacked Charlie Hebdo knew what they were doing, incidentally. They picked a Wednesday, the day of the week when the staff actually turned up at the office for a meeting, and they knew whom they wanted, apparently, since they asked for them by name. Their intelligence was very good, as was their armaments, and their training.

I’ll get back to that armaments and training in a moment.

Now, I’ll take a minute to make a point: it is utterly unacceptable, completely wrong, to kill anyone, or hurt them, or imprison them, for expressing an opinion or point of view. It does not matter what that opinion or point of view is; as long as nobody is harmed by said expression of opinion, everyone has the right to say what they want. And they also have the responsibility for the fallout of that expression of opinion.

If Mr X makes a racist, crude, vulgar remark in public, and Ms Y criticises him and calls him a vulgar, crass, racist pig, there’s nothing X can do about it. If X makes libellous accusations against Y, he can’t hide behind “freedom of speech” when she drags him to court. And if he urges someone else, say Z, to take a gun and shoot Y, she will entirely be in her rights to get him done for incitement to murder.

Let me emphasise again what I’ve said many times, and what I explicitly stated here, writing on the Danish Muhammad cartoons:

“...the newspaper had no intention of promoting a free discussion as it claimed. As I said, its only purpose was to offend as many Muslims as much as possible.

By any logical definition, an action designed to offend another person comes under hate speech. Freedom of speech is not absolute anywhere in the world; you can’t go into a crowded theatre, yell “fire” and then claim that you’re innocent of the resultant stampede because you were merely expressing your freedom of speech. Similarly, if you go to scream racial epithets at someone, and that person reacts with anger, you can’t get away from the responsibility for knowingly and deliberately provoking that anger. That’s why hate speech laws exist.”

But of course the whole Charlie Hebdo “freedom of speech” thing had nothing at all to do with freedom of speech. It was, as the blog the Vineyard of the Saker says,

“...when Charlie Hebdo published their caricatures of the Prophet and when they ridiculed him the a deliberately rude and provocative manner, they knew what they were doing: they were very deliberately deeply offending 1.6 billion Muslims world wide... I am disgusted beyond words with the obscene display of doubleplusgoodthinking "solidarity" for a group of "caviar-lefties" who made their money spitting in the souls of billions of people and then dared them to do something about it.”

Isn’t that the very basis of Western Islamomisia? Aren’t people like Jyllands-Posten (of the Danish Muhammad cartoons) and Charlie Hebdo basically telling the Muslims of the world, “This is what we’re doing, we’re spitting in your face, and you can do nothing about it, any more than you can do about our drones blowing away your kids and wedding parties. And up yours too”? They are.

If Charlie Hebdo et al had been bloviating in a vacuum, things might have been different. But the situation is far from a vacuum. In the last twenty years, the West has bombed, invaded, occupied and destroyed numerous Muslim nations, every single time on false pretences. The cages of Guantanamo have been crammed with Muslim prisoners who were never charged with any crime and tortured in a fashion which in a just world would end with the torturers in a war crimes dock. Muslims are routinely discriminated against in every way, their rights as human beings trampled on, and racist rhetoric against them not just tolerated but encouraged by media networks, not to speak of antitheist fascists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Also, France is one of the most racist nations in the world, to the point that brown-skinned people on forced airport layovers aren’t even provided the free hotel accommodation that their privileged white co-passengers receive. It isn’t surprising under these circumstances that a backlash occurred. If anything, it’s surprising that it took so long.

I am, as anyone who’s been reading me for a while knows, a somewhat opinionated person. And I don’t usually keep my opinions secret. This not keeping my opinions secret has got me many, many death threats over the years – I’d estimate a hundred or so at the very least, and that’s not counting the threats of mere physical violence. That basically means that if anyone should be on Charlie Hebdo’s side in this imbroglio, I ought to be. But I am not. I refuse in any manner or fashion to share the online stage with this virulent, racist, sexist, homophobic, hypocritical specimen of gutter “journalism”.

Hypocritical, did I say? Why, yes. This same Charlie Hebdo, which insinuates that it is a martyr in the battle for free speech, tried to get the National Front party in France banned a while back. The National Front is another set of racist right wing fascists – but it, too, is non-violent, and its views ought to be as protected as Charlie Hebdo’s own. But that idea didn’t go down well with the magazine, apparently.

No, I am definitely not Charlie Hebdo. Unlike the people who unthinkingly hashtag themselves #jesuischarlie or whatever, because they are, like it or not, identifying themselves with the racist bullying of this piece of gutter journalism posing as a satirical magazine.

One can definitely be against both sides in a dispute, you see. Just because one side is wrong doesn’t make the other right by default, whatever Hollywood and the crude Western thinking process want to pretend.

Now just suppose, in my personal example, that one of the charming people who have so eloquently threatened to murder me with everything from a drone to a baseball bat actually carried out their intentions. Would that mean, just because they killed me, that my ideas were automatically vindicated? Of course not. Ideas stand on their own merit, independent of who holds them.  

Let this clearly be understood: though Charlie Hebdo was attacked, and its staff murdered, that doesn’t mean that its ideas are post-facto rehabilitated. It remains a racist, repugnant rag, and the cartoonists and editorial staff killed are still people whose opinions have no place in civilised society.

I find it rich, too, that the people who suddenly discovered the virtues of free speech are the same people who bombed a Serbian TV station in 1999, who repeatedly and deliberately targeted Al Jazeera journalists during the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and who consider Wikileaks “terrorism”. These are the same people who criminalise “glorification of terrorism”, whatever that might mean.

Some free speech, apparently, is freer than others.

Now let’s look at the other lot. Let’s assume Charlie Hebdo – whose humongous circulation, as I said, is an astonishing sixty thousand – was known to all the 1600 million Muslims in the world, and angered all of them equally, and all of them wanted to kill the cartoonists and editorial staff. Even if that was so, those 1600 million Muslims didn’t lift a finger to attack anyone on the magazine. It was a team of three, even according to the authorities, who attacked the magazine office. And they had automatic weapons and military training and a measure of discipline.

Now where do ordinary people get their hands on automatic weapons, if not military training and discipline?

Answer: they don’t.

But if they’re prospective Islamic terrorists, they jolly well do. France (like its NATO ally Britain and lord and master USA) has been, as anyone who has been following recent history can’t but be aware, up to its nose in promoting Islamic terrorism. In 2011, it openly armed, financed and trained Islamic terrorists against the government of Libya. Its planes acted as Al Qaeda’s air force, destroying the army of the (strongly anti-Islamic terrorism) Colonel Gaddafi. 

French planes bombing Benghazi [Source]

Even as the victorious Islamist militias then turned on each other, France et al were rushing to arm and train and finance Islamic jihadist terrorists in Syria. If France had had its way – it was even more eager than the US – Syria would have been bombed into ruins in 2013, and the Islamic jihadist gangs would have been massacring people there with impunity, just as black Libyans were massacred in 2011 after the “revolution” “triumphed”. At this very moment, even as you read this, France et al are still helping arm, train and finance Obama’s cannibal headhunters vetted moderate Syrian rebels in camps in Jordan, and making absolutely no secret of the fact.

And let’s not even go into French, as well as other Western, support for Nazis in Ukraine.

If there is anything we ought to have learnt since the CIA-assisted anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s, it’s that cosseting jihadists always leads to blowback. Nor do jihadists keep their Western-provided arms and training to themselves. Even according to the French claims, one of the two “Islamist” brothers claimed to have been trained by Al Qaeda in Yemen, while the other had gone to Syria to take part in the French-sponsored war against the secular Assad government there.

Meanwhile, the most unsavoury, not to say criminal, elements in the West are eager to take advantage of this attack in every way possible – including demands to destroy

“The perpetrators. Their enablers. Their ideologues. Their fellow travelers (sic)” [Source]

Any intelligent person ought to be able to comprehend that these terms are (deliberately) so vague as to be stretched to justify attacking anyone and anything. And people who never heard of Charlie Hebdo until three days ago are eager to shed blood, exactly as the warmongers on both sides desire.

I’ll end this with an observation. On the very day when alleged Yemen-trained Islamic jihadists murdered the staff of Charlie Hebdo, a jihadist bomb killed over forty people in Yemen. Did you come across that bit of information in the media?

No, I didn’t think so.

It's A Rich Man's World

"All the things I could do

If I had a little money

It's a rich man's world"

                                                        ~ ABBA, Money Money Money

Early today, a car thief was caught red-handed breaking into a vehicle in the basement parking lot of the building where I have my clinic.

He wasn’t much of a thief to look at. Not more than 14 years old, if that, with a remarkably innocent face. The security guard employed by the building management caught him, and he was under citizen’s arrest when I got there, awaiting the arrival of the police.

Now, I want to say right away that this wasn’t one of those cases where poverty had driven a child to crime. As it turned out, the kid was from a middle class family, and was out for a fast buck. Whatever a fence would pay him for the car (or a CD player or anything else he could steal from it if he couldn’t manage to get away with the vehicle itself) could finance a lot of electronic equipment and cool clothes.

In fact, until the last few years, juvenile crime was almost unknown in this part of the country. However, ever since “economic liberalisation” and the rise of the Great Indian Muddle Class, moral values have taken a battering, and kids are taking shortcuts to wealth more and more. We aren’t quite at the point of child gangs like those of City of God, but we’ll get there eventually.

 As far as this particular young criminal was concerned, he was lucky. Nobody lynched him or even laid a finger on him. If he’d been in parts of North India, he mightn’t have been quite so lucky.

I mentioned this little, and quite unimportant, episode because it dovetails with a major “scandal” which has the Indian media all agog at the moment. A former child actress, one Shweta Basu, was caught by a sting operation doubling as a high-priced hooker.

As the salacious details of this young woman’s fall from grace were splashed all over the media – and she’s not alone – the magazines all noted that she had turned to prostitution because her movie career had gone nowhere, leaving her desperately short of money. Some of them also spoke of how prostitution could be legalised as a way out of the undoubtedly ludicrous employment of police energies in stalking adults engaging in private sexual activity.

Now, this is not a discussion about the legal status of prostitution, a topic on which I have very mixed feelings. On the one hand, legalisation would undoubtedly reduce the harassment of prostitutes by police for protection money, would make it a regular, official and taxable business, and would go some way to reducing the colossal hypocrisy which puts all the blame for the sex trade on the prostitute herself. On the other, even in nations with legal prostitution like the Netherlands, women from Eastern Europe are still being sexually enslaved – and in our hypercorrupt environment I have no doubt that things would be no better.

In any case, that’s a topic for another day.

Now, while the magazines drooled salaciously over Basu and made references to the casting couch, they left one topic alone. What they emphatically did not say was that she had no other avenue for employment for the simple reason that she – like the others – had thrown way her childhood in acting rather than education.

It’s actually a depressingly common phenomenon here; parents push their kids to succeed at all costs, to the point where the kid becomes little more than an automaton. I personally knew at least two teenagers who committed suicide because they couldn’t take the pressure their parents put on them (and I was, as those who know me personally are aware, very nearly a third). And if the kid has any chance at all of earning money as a child actor or model, why, a lot of educated parents suddenly decide education isn’t so important after all, and that immediate earnings are much more important.

It’s the same get-rich-quick impulse of a consumerist society which drives car thieves like the one from this morning. Ad it comes crashing down a well, when one day the child, now grown, finds herself with no job, no education and no prospects.

If this had been a society which cares for its children, it would have had laws forcing parents to educate their children, and in the case of child actors and the like to limit their time in the studios to vacations. At the moment, the only limiting factors are the child’s ability to land roles – and the parents’ greed.

Of course, the parents never blame themselves. It’s never their fault for not teaching the child the difference between right and wrong, or for not thinking of the star-of-the-moment’s long-term future. Either way, they're prostituting their kids, in one way or another.

It’s only the money, and what it can buy, that matters.

 I wonder what will happen to Ms Basu, and to the car thief. I'd like to think they'll straighten out their lives.

But, given the realities of how these things go, I doubt it very much.

Wham Scam

Something interesting happened Saturday.

Actually, a lot of interesting things happened Saturday, including people so far round the bend that they needed a psychiatrist, not a dentist, but that’s a story for another day.

But this is what happened:

Now, I bought – like most Indians who have life insurance – policies from one primary source, the state-run Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC). I have three policies from them, all bought together about thirteen years ago. I’m not really a believer in life insurance, but I get a tax rebate for the investment, just FYI.

So.

On Saturday – that’s 26^th July – at just after 1230 pm (remember that time – it’s important), I was at work when I got a phone call from a person  who identified himself as Rohan Sharma and started asking questions about my LIC policies. He verified that I had LIC policies, and immediately asked if I was still in touch with the agent from whom I’d bought the policies. I said I wasn’t. (Actually, the agent was an ex-girlfriend who is now not associated with LIC in any way and with whom I no longer interact in any fashion. We have...a history.)

As soon as I’d said that I wasn’t in touch with the LIC agent, the caller’s voice changed. He said he was from Future Generali India LIC Ltd. (a private insurance company of which I hadn’t previously ever heard until that moment). He said that my LIC policies had earned “benefits” of over 130,000 rupees, payable on 30^th December 2014 – these “benefits” (of which I had never before heard either) were allegedly the interest on my policy premiums, which were reinvested by LIC and FGILIC in the ratio of 30:70.

So far so good. But...?

But, this Sharma said, the money would not be paid to me since the company had received my file back with a notification saying “please cancel his benefits” and the amount would be then returned to LIC and my LIC agent. Horrors!

So – you understand that it was my lunch break, so I had some time free – I asked him what I should do. I’ll pass you on to my superior Rahul Khanna, he told me, and gave me a file number (ADN 17417) to quote. So I waited for a few seconds and was put through to this Mr Khanna, who for all I know might have been sitting in the same room. Right.

The first thing Rahul Khanna asked me – again – was whether I was in touch with my LIC agent. I said I wasn’t, and again at once I could just about hear his voice change instantly. (If I’d have told them that I was in contact with my LIC agent, they’d have dropped the conversation immediately.) He then went over the same ground as the earlier guy. I asked him what I was supposed to do.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll help you. I’ll give you some personal advice.”

Thank you so much, and what is this personal advice?

“You could buy a fresh policy from us,” he said, “one which matures on 30^th December. So on that day when your policy matures the sum will be returned to you along with the 130,000 rupees of yours lying with us.”

But there was a catch. “You’ll have to do it immediately.” Because if I waited, the file would be “closed”. In fact I would have to buy the policy immediately, right away. Like in half an hour.

How do I do that, I asked.

No problem, he said, all I had to do was courier him (to an address he gave me, in Pune) some things. What things?

1.     A photocopy of my PAN card (a tax card for Indian taxpayers).

2.     A photocopy of my driving licence (for ID purposes)

3.     Two passport sized photographs and

4.     Two cheques (Ah, you were wondering when I was going to get to that):

                  (a) A crossed cheque for Rs 20,100/- favouring Future Generali India LIC Ltd

                  (b) A cancelled signed cheque.

All these had to be sent by 2pm – less than an hour and a half, while I was talking to him. I told him I didn’t have a copy of my PAN card available, just to see how he would react. No problem, he said, you can send that later.

And after couriering these things, I was supposed to let him know the courier consignment note number (so they could pick up the envelope at the courier office, I assume) and I need have no further worries.

Why not?

Because as soon as he’d got the cheques he would provide me with a “secret log on” which I would have to use to recover my money at the appropriate time. Sounds legit, yeah.

By now, of course, two things were already screaming “scam” at me, apart from the fact that I’d never heard of any such “benefits” from anyone who had ever taken an LIC policy. The first was his extreme insistence on haste. What was the tearing hurry? How come, if Saturday was the “last day”, did he have to wait till then to call me, and then till 1230? Incidentally, the LIC working hours on Saturday are from 1030 to 1230, so since he called just after that I shouldn’t have been able to contact them to verify the situation. Also, it seemed to me that the rush was meant to prevent my taking the time to think.

And the second thing? Well, that private insurance companies are closed on Saturday.

As soon as he had terminated the conversation I walked over to the LIC office, which is only a short distance from my clinic. As I anticipated, the staff was still there, and I managed to speak to one of them. He told me what I already knew, that there was no such “benefit” due me. Just to check, I looked up the Future Generali India LIC head office phone number online and called them. The only person I got was a security guard who informed me, sure enough, that the place was closed on Saturday. He did, though, give me the FGILIC customer service helpline number, and I called them. What they told me was that their office never contacted non-customers in any manner and that this was a scam.

Meanwhile, the scammers kept calling me at roughly five minute intervals from 130 pm onwards, probably desperate to prod me into sending the cheque. I didn’t take any of the calls, and they stopped abruptly after 2 pm. Incidentally, these calls were allegedly coming from Pune, but my caller ID identified it as a Delhi number.

The whole experience was both fairly instructive as well as entertaining, and it gave a good window into the modus operandi of these criminals. It’s certain that they are either employees of FGILIC or have someone on the inside, who will cash the cheque for them. They also, without a doubt, haven’t tried this only on me; and I’ll bet that they get busy every weekend, when people are mostly at home and have time to talk to them, but not enough time to think, and no way to check up.

I’ve sent a letter describing these events in a more abbreviated version to the local paper, and in a much more formal version (with the purported names and phone numbers of the scammers) to the LIC here. Let’s see if they take any action.

I can imagine the scammers’ pleased anticipation when they’d imagined they’d got me in the bag, and their baffled fury when I stopped taking their calls. Well, at least they wasted time on me (not to mention phone bills) they could have used to successfully scam somebody else.

Like scambaiting, the great cyber sport where one keeps Nigerian princes and deceased Sierra Leonean businessmen’s daughters busy with outrageously funny email exchanges, that’s a victory.

Caveat insurer.

  

J'Accuse!

This is not a happy article.

This is an article filled with anger. This is one of the times I am totally and completely furious – but not the way you’d think. No.

Probably I should explain.

If you remember, back in December 2012, India had been “shaken” by mass protests against a particularly gruesome rape-murder in Delhi. I’d written about it at the time. The protestors marched on the streets, beat a policeman to death, organised text message campaigns demanding the death penalty for the rapists, and polluted the air with the smoke from their candlelight vigils.

The story was repeated in August last year, when a young journalist was gang-raped on the premises of an abandoned textile mill in Bombay. Once again, the Muddle Class was exercised, and the media went to town on the rape for all it was worth.

After all, this is the nation where forensic medicine textbooks still say women shouldn’t be trusted in their accounts of being raped and fairly recently a judge acquitted some rapists on the grounds that they were middle-aged and “rape is committed by teenagers”. So it’s a good trend, you’d have thought, if the country was finally rising up in anger against rape and sexual assault.

You would be wrong.

On the 27^th May, three days ago as I write this, two cousins, girls aged 14 and either 15 or 16, went missing in a village in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh state in North India. Their corpses were discovered the next day, hanging from a mango tree in an orchard near the village. They’d both been gang-raped before being killed – and the local police was hand-in-glove with the rapists.

Actual photograph of the scene

 You’d think the country would erupt with anger, wouldn’t you? You’d think the people would be in the streets again, demanding justice?

Apart from the local people, the parents and other villagers, who knew perfectly well who was responsible and who refused to let the bodies be removed till the perpetrators were arrested, just about no one was interested – except for some politicians looking for publicity. The media reported it, but only as filler news. On the net, by my own experience, foreigners were more disturbed and appalled than Indians were.

Why?

Not a mystery.

Let me quote what I’d said back in December 2012:

(T)he Great Indian Muddle Class ... sees itself as superior to the masses from which it has emerged, and it aspires to separate itself from them as far as possible. Unlike the middle class in other parts of the world, it doesn’t see itself as preyed on by the upper class; the upper class is its ideal, the realm to which it aspires....

On the other hand, the Muddle Class hates and fears the underclasses. It feels threatened by them – by their increasingly uppity demand for a place in the sun and by their competitiveness. To the Muddle Class, the underclass isn’t PLUs (People Like Us) – they are PLTs (People Like Them). It’s the underclass who threaten the Muddle Class’ upwards march. It’s the underclass which reminds the Muddle Class of the morass from whence it sprung, and where it’s terrified of returning.

So when six members of the underclass rape a woman of the Muddle Class, it’s not a crime against an individual woman. It’s a strike against the Muddle Class. Think of it as a serf raising his hand against a nobleman, and you won’t be far from the idea.

...It’s an absolute certainty that if the victim of the rape had been of the labourer set, there would have been as little reaction from the Muddle Class as there is when (as happens routinely) rich kids driving SUVs get drunk and crush homeless people to death. The Muddle Class doesn’t care about anyone but itself.

Accordingly, whatever the “protests” appear to be, they are not actually against the rapes – they are protests against the Muddle Class being made to feel vulnerable. No more, no less.

The victims in this latest episode were of the lowest castes, “Dalits”, who were once known as “Untouchables”. The perpetrators are Yadavs, further up the caste system but still pretty far down the totem pole. Both the victims and the victimisers are a world away from the air-conditioned malls and McDonalds of the Great Indian Muddle Class. If the Muddle Class thinks of them at all, it is with an unfathomable contempt.

And that is why these two girls don’t exist as far as the Muddle Class is concerned. It’s still basking in the electoral victory of its Hindunazi heroes, it’s looking forward to its promised “achche din” (good times), and the death of two of the members of the Lower Depths is about as irrelevant as it can get so far as the Muddle Class people are concerned. It doesn’t, after all, reflect on them, and that’s all they’re concerned about.

And this is why I am furious. Not at the rapists, as you might think – they’ll get what’s coming to them, never fear. I am furious at the Muddle Class, at the swine who were screaming for justice a year and a half ago but who are so deafeningly silent now. Where is your sense of justice, your outrage? Where are all your Facebook campaigns and candlelight vigils? Does it only affect you when you feel threatened? What kind of “outrage” is that?

Hypocrites.

I spit on the lot of you.