Yellow Bellies in Delhi?

I’m sure few well-adjusted people with a normally functioning sense of right and wrong will not have given a quiet – or not so quiet – cheer that four of the men charged with the Delhi rapes that shocked the world have been handed the ultimate suspended sentence. Justice done, now move along, there’s nothing more to see and India moves a step closer to recognising the rights of women. Yay!

But wait. It turns out that only two executions have been carried out in India since 2004 despite around one hundred death sentences being handed out in a typical year. In other words, well, it’s just words. Many lawyers will get rich on the appeals and the guilty men will simply languish, forgotten, in jail. At least a fifth man did the decent thing and hanged himself in his cell during the trial; maybe there’s hope that the prison system will have the means to bring about what the courts almost certainly have only played lip service to.

And India is the loser, as it plods along the inevitable road to resembling a modern, ‘progressive’ state, shedding itself of decisiveness and strength and adopts the typical hand-wringing postures of the liberal west. Even as rape begins to be taken seriously, it divests itself of the will to take effective action against it. Welcome to the mealy-mouthings of socialism, Mother India and get ready to grapple daily with the conundrums of doublethink.

How, for instance, do you deliver ‘social justice’ without creating a client constituency ever more dependent on what is effectively state enforced charity? How can you effectively tackle crime when you know who did it but you have to balance up the socio-ethnic quotas by criminalising the victims instead? And how do you raise academic achievement while simultaneously maintaining the lie of equality?

The price, it seems, of acceptance to the top table is to lie down, roll over and have your tummy tickled by Uncle Karl. No more strong leadership – if Nick Clegg has his way we will have toothless coalitions for ever. No more aspirational world rankings – when John Lennon’s vision comes about we will all have an equal amount of rice to eat. No more nationalities – when the great bubbling stew pot of humanity finally blends into one giant indistinguishable mocha there will be no will left for individualism.

Is that what ‘they’ [who?] want? Is that really the final solution? Solve inequality by outlawing betterment? Solve the burka issue by making everybody wear one? Solve party politics by having only one party? Solve choice by having no choice? That’s what it looks like from where I'm sitting.

But people are fighting back, after all. All over Europe the response to an amorphous and lumbering one-size-fits-all administration is the rise of nationalism. In so-called ‘austerity’ Britain people are rejecting the disastrous borrow and spend plans of Miliband’s morons. And even the criminals, incensed at the breakdown in effective justice are doing their bit to help by, when released on bail,  reoffending at an average rate of a crime every ten minutes.

So, there’s hope for us yet…