The Taj Mahal is not the only wonder in Uttar Pradesh. The ruling Yadav clan of the State is another. If the first takes your breath away by its sheer beauty and by being a monument of love, the second repulses you by its insensitivity towards women.
The bad news is that the State's First Family will continue to hold on to power for some time; the good news is that the party it leads will most certainly be ousted as soon as the Assembly election is held. The second good news is that while the Taj Mahal and the shining ideals it represents will continue to lure people, the discredited Yadav clan will be forgotten as an unfortunate footnote in the pages of history.
Imagine, Mulayam Singh Yadav, who leads the ruling brigade as the party supremo and in offering the most outrageous remarks, dreamt (and still dreams) of becoming the country's Prime Minister. Imagine also that he becomes Prime Minister by some unfortunate quirk of political play in the near future. We shall then have the honour of having a head of Government who believes that rape is a mere “mistake” committed by the young, because “boys will be boys”. And, we shall soak in the dignity of having a Prime Minister who holds that the amendments to the anti-rape laws done in recent months to strengthen the provisions were the handiwork of demented minds.
The wonderful thing about the wonder that is the Yadav clan is that wonders don't cease with one member. Mulayam Singh Yadav's brother and parliamentarian, Ram Gopal Yadav, informs us that the beastly spirits of man are aroused by the media, films and television. And once that happens, what can a poor Government do but wait for the inevitable to occur and thereafter take “strict” actionIJ
Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav may be the youngest of the Mulayam-Ram-Gopal-Akhilesh trio, but he is no less of a wonder. Of course the horrible Badaun incident happened where two minor cousins were first raped and then hanged to death, he agrees. It's also true that there has been a spate of rape and molestation incidents in the State in the last fortnight. But it’s the “chaalu” people who are over-playing it. He then delivers the wisdom: He asks pestering journalists to do a “Google search” which will reveal that rapes are happening all over the country and the world. What's the big dealIJ
It's no big deal for the ruling Yadavs and their party. The two innocent girls, barely 15 years of age, came from the backward Maurya-Shakya community. Unlike the Yadavs, this backward class is not a traditional voter of the Samajwadi Party. On the other hand, the accused belong to the Yadav community. Everybody understands the caste game in Uttar Pradesh, and nobody understands it better than the State's police packed with sympathisers of the ruling caste or those belonging to it. Thus, when the victims' family members approached the police, the police assured them that the girls would “return” in a couple of hours. When the members went to the police again after the deadline passed, they were told to visit the site where eventually the girls were found hanging from the branches of a tree. It's almost as if the local police knew all along where the girls were, who had abducted them, what had been the motive behind the abduction, and what would happen to the victims thereafter.
Now, visualise a situation where the victims had been from the Yadav community and the accused belonged to either the upper castes (who have turned away from the Samajwadi Party) or the Scheduled Castes (that have traditionally backed the Bahujan Samaj Party, though in this lok Sabha election, there appears to have been a shift elsewhere). The police would have put its best foot forward —showing the same alacrity as it had when a senior Samajwadi Party Minister intervened to get a bunch of accused released in connection with the Muzaffarnagar incident — and registered an FIR even before the victims' family had completed relating their woes. The police would have also rescued the victims. Police personnel of Uttar Pradesh are not incompetent; remember how they had succeeded in locating the missing buffaloes of a Minister (incidentally, it’s the same Minister who is said to have interfered in the Muzaffarnagar issue).
The police did what it thought was the ‘safe' thing. It behaved in a manner that, it believed from experience, would keep its political bosses satisfied. Victims of rape can be hanged to death, but the perpetrators of rape should not (refer to Mulayam Singh Yadav). But for a meddlesome media, the Badaun incident (and the many others) would have been quietly brushed under the carpet. The Yadav clan must be feeling enormously relieved that the victims were not Dalits, else the Government would have been compelled to apply the stringent provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act against the accused.
The State Government has launched large-scale transfers and suspensions of bureaucrats and police officials in the wake of the rising incidents of sexual crimes against women. The idea is to shake up the administration from lethargy. But none of this is going to work unless the mindset of the rulers changes. Words spoken, like arrows shot from a quiver, cannot be taken back. The least that the Yadav members of the ruling family can now do is to apologise for their insensitive statements. But the likelihood of it happening is as bright as that of India winning the World Cup Football in the next decade.
Therefore, what we have been seeing over the past few days is a further hardening of those silly remarks. Women leaders of the Samajwadi Party have been defending the Yadav-blunders on television studios and, believe it or not, claiming that Mulayam Singh Yadav & Group is acutely sensitive to women's issues. They sound so pathetic, especially given that they cannot even take refuge by saying the leaders had been ‘misquoted’ or that their remarks had been ‘taken out of context’.
The fact is that the Akhilesh Yadav regime has brought caste (and to an extent, religious affiliation) to the core of the law and order issue in the State. Mayawati too had done something similar during her rein in the name of empowering the Dalits, but she was clever enough to maintain a grip (at least relative to this regime) on the law and order situation. One reason for this was that Mayawati owed her position also to the upper castes who had tied up with the Dalits (social engineering) to bring her victory.