More than once in the past couple of weeks, before he climbed into his plane to fly off to more island na­tions, Narendra Modi was at his his­trionic, chest-thumping best in Parliament. His voice rose and fell as he spoke, now in a shouted challenge and then dropping to a whisper. 

MPs, and a larger audience outside, watched spellbound when Modi re­plied to the debate on the Motion of Thanks to the President’s speech in the Lok Sabha on February 27. Even the desk-thumping Bharatiya Janata Party benches remained si­lent for long stretches as Modi held forth. He said his opponents expect­ed him to shut down the previous government’s flagship rural jobs programme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Generation scheme, but he was too politically smart to do so. MNREGA was living testament to 60 years of poor still need to dig ditches to earn their subsistence. It was pugilistic. It was lung powerful. 

Modi repeated that performance a few days later when he brandished his patriotism after Mufti Mohammad Sayeed embarrassed his BJP partners by freeing a mili­tant leader from prison. In my last column I asked how long the BJP’s pact with Mufti’s PDP could last, and already Modi and Home Minister Rajnath Singh have been forced to say that they prize national security over the Kashmir alliance. 

In an odd way the Jammu and Kashmir chief minister’s duplicity was a counterpoint to Modi’s Janus-faced strategy of political expedient question, just 18 months after the BJP supported the Congress govern­ment’s bill, it is now trying to undo key parts that relate to consent, com­pensation and social impact assess­ment. Opposition parties have unit­ed against Modi’s amendments in parliament’s upper house, labelling them blatantly pro-big business and anti-farmer. And despite Modi’s sec­ular protestations, the BJP’s Hindutva brethren continue to spout venom. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Praveen Togadia, who had ostensibly fallen out with Modi during his Gujarat days, was allowed to enter and speak in Jammu, where he had been banned in the past. The Hindu Mahasabha has said it will press on with its ghar wapsi re-con­version campaign. 

The BJP may have grumblers in its ranks, particularly in Jammu & Kashmir, but at least it is not self-de­structing like the strange party that rules the Delhi city-state. Indeed, AAP is now unquestionably Arvind Above Party. Three weeks after tak­ing power on the crest of a huge landslide, Kejriwal is sulking at a naturopathy clinic in Bangalore while his acolytes tell tales of his tearful response to dissent and pile up more dirty linen. 

It is politics by stealth, sting and star chamber, that extra-constitu­tional invention of medieval English kings. It is tragic, even if it is comic. 

‘Comic’ reminded me of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, who would have yelled ‘Kreegah! Bundolo! White man comes with hurt stick!’ if he was debating the ban on the BBC documentary India’s Daughter with us. Let me connect the dots. Narendra Modi’s victory last year was not just a political upheavel. It was a societal earthquake that triggered a tsunami of Indian-ness. That tidal wave of self-belief is still rolling through our land. It is supposed to be lifting all our boats. Sometimes it sinks some.

Our outcome of this new self-consciousness is a tendency to assign national outrage to every cause, the feeling that we Indians have been picked on by the rest of the world for far too long, and that it is time we stoop up and made clear that We. Have. Teeth. Our anger is not director against the filmmaker, but also against a perceived Hindu-phobia and orientalism. We seem not to realize that we are guilty of xenopho­bia and jingoism. Not too long ago we respected orientalists, Western scholars who spent most of their lives studying Eastern cultures, lan­guages, Stature and religions. Now that word has become a term of abuse, and those studies are suspect and/or reeking of bias. We have a vi­brant press and excellent documen­tary makers. Why did nobody think of interrogating the people involved in, and interested in, the December 2012 crime? If a mirror had to be held up to the failings in our society, the misogyny and criminality that lurk in so many dark corners, why did we wait for an English woman to hold it? 

The simple answer is that we have grown accustomed to flitting from one sensation to another. We very rarely look back and follow up and ask what happened to the last scan­dalmonger, the last perpetrator, the last sexual predator. 

It is two years since the Justice J.S. Verma commission released its weighty report on sexual crimes and proposed amendments to criminal law. Within weeks, parliament eon acted a major expansion of the definition of rape, the procedures to be followed in investigations of com| plaints of sexual violence, and the punishments for such crimcrimes,throughendments to both the Criminal Procedure Code and the Indian Penal Code. We see more headlines on rapes, but not more in­vestigations of the attitudes and so­cial structures that spawn rape. 

The National Crime Records Bureau began collating rape statis­tics in 1971; it has murder data dating back to 1953. The NCRB says 33,707 rapes were committed in 2013, against 33,201 murders. That should tell us something. It is true that India is not by far reporting the world’s worst rat io of rape cases, but some of that could be because of gross un­der-reporting. In 2013, for example, the NCRB recorded 118,866 cases of “cruelty by husband or his rela­tives”, which was 38.4 per cent of the total of 309,546 crimes against wom­en nationwide. Cases of kidnapping and abduction of women and girls totaled 51,881, which was 80 per cent of the national total for both sexes. 

So, by frothing at our mouths about white-skinned snoops who dare to expose our failings, and by imposing bans on India’s Daughter on televi­sion and the web, we only confirm our stupidity andprimitivismm. 

Part of this stems from the perpetu­al-victim syndrome that I wrote about recently Part stems from the menace that springs out when you uncover a basketful of cobras. It is time to put the lid back on. 

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