I don’t know about you but I do not have the moral courage to click to ‘play’ to watch two minor girls swinging from a branch of a tree after being raped. But if Mr Modi’s government was to call me and ask me to shoot the three rapists and their two police cohorts in Katra village in Uttar Pradesh, I would cheerfully oblige and then go have a hearty lunch with some burgundy to celebrate my act of valour and vindication. I would feel no remorse.

I do not advocate violence and I am all for due process and the course of justice for human beings. But not for sub-human savages. And this is the category for such ghouls. Even such writing has an exploitative quality to it and you feel the nausea as you click your keys because you feel in some way you are invading those little girls’ privacy by talking about something beyond your ken.

I hear on CNN that there are more mobile phones in India than there are toilets per person. Got it. WHO tells me that 650 million Indian people defecate each morning in the open. Got it. The two girls were similarly relieving themselves when they were accosted. Got it. All 650 million are sort of vulnerable. Got it.

The world need not get holier than thou with India. Heinous crimes are global. We do not need outside advice. We are wounded enough without band-aids of piety. But we cannot wish this away. It is our bounden duty to stand up as one and call for a new law, a fast-track court, a public punishment, something that changes the equation and disallows such sick barbarians to share the earth with us.

Unless we do this or compel the Indian government to pass these new laws and enforce them we are complicit in the crime. And such crimes will not stop. There is no fear of retribution, no national outrage beyond a flicker of anger and this is our weakness. We expect these things to happen. We are either reconciled to these scenarios or simply accepting of whatever evil forces exist out there. The staying power is non-existent. We move on.
Come on Mr Modi’s government, don’t go stand by the hanging tree but stop us from moving on, give us the comfort of knowing that the scarring of the Indian psyche, the horrific criminal intent, the complete absence of morality in the guilty demand the home ministry under your regime must go radical on such abuses. Expressions of fury are not enough. You promised governance. Now get up and give it.

Of course you shudder with roiling disgust, of course you will have nightmares if you watch that video. Of course you will seethe at your own impotency that you can do nothing but flinch and feel a sliver of the agony of that family or what horror those little girls must have gone through.
Get up India, we have a new leadership, as yet short of being jaded, let’s make them do the right thing for the right reasons.