Defence of rapist or defence of country’s rape?

A couple of years ago, a senior assistant of Jaya Prakash Narayan came to meet my philosopher friend, U G Krishnamurthy.
Jaya Prakashji has succeeded in persuading 600 dacoits to lay down their arms in North India, the assistant said with a flourish, hoping to make an impression on U G.
All very well, replied U G. But what’s he going to do about those 600 dacoits whom we have put into the Indian Parliament? How is he going to save the people from their bloodthirsty games?
Politicians often complain that the world at large believes that they don’t share the same moral status as everyone else when it comes to the treatment they receive from the media and particularly their depiction on the silver screen.
It’s true that we film-makers sometimes abuse, degrade, ridicule, beat to pulp and even kill the villain politician in the cathartic moment of the climax.
Arousing an emotion of anger, disdain and ridicule in the viewer and then gratifying it has no doubt been a profitable business for us.
In the past, we have often been apologetic about the way we have stripped the politician of his every ruse, exposed him and then gloated over his destruction.
Forcing the politician into a passive position and then humiliating him in the virtual world is perhaps the only way we can live out our fantasies of what we would really like to happen.
Perhaps it is a means for us to cope with our helplessness. It gives us a feeling of power which the common man in effect, longs for, but does not have.
For me, the defining image of villainy of the week was George Fernandes’ macabre defence of the government. In the Lok Sabha. Instead of comforting the women victimised in the Gujarat carnage, our defence minister mouthed dialogues that even the most-demented writer of a C grade Hindi movie would find hard to dream up. With mounting disbelief, a nation heard him say that slashing a woman’s stomach and tearing out the foetus was nothing new. His defence of the rapist in the state has effectively turned into a defence of the rape of our country. How did the oppressed of yesterday become the new oppressors? What happened, George? You seem to be as convinced of your new-found divine rights to justify and condone unspeakable acts of violence and terror as those with whom you once locked horns with. What happened? The higher-ups must have merely required you to bend, why on earth did you start to crawl? Is this why we put you there? How could you betray us so?
But wait. Take heart. It is not you alone who has betrayed our country. It is all of us, a nation of one billion slaves, who have been a party to the great betrayal. Through our apathy and indifference, we have turned upon ourselves, and festered and rotted like a giant, gangrenous wound.
Our betrayal is infinitely more repulsive. So do us a favour George. Instead of telling Sonia Gandhi to stop chewing gum, go tell our poor jawans to stop sacrificing their lives for us worms, who are in any case crawling in the dirt. We don’t deserve their protection and their blood.
And tell your party that for us in the film business, there is a happy ending. In this tragedy, we have found a new formula to reinvent the Hindi film villain. And guess what he’s going to look like? He will have the body of saffron-clad Uma Bharati, the guts of George Fernandes, the demonic mind of our very own home-grown Hitler, Narendra Modi, and finally the mask of our dear Prime Minister, whose poems lulled only himself to sleep while Gujarat burned.