January 2023

Cram Jihad

“UP [Uttar Pradesh] Boy Kills Self Over Study Pressure | Another Life Lost In Kota.” (Mirror Now, YouTube) [Kota is known as India’s “cram city,” where “students from across the country pay steep fees to be tutored for elite-college admissions exams.”]

Given the Tunisha Sharma precedent (see “Breakup as abetment to suicide” in Law 28), I assume someone’s got to be arrested. As breaking up with one’s girlfriend can be construed as abetment to suicide absent any clue of mens rea, most certainly academic pressure is “cram jihad.” Find the culprits and act; do not wait for your BJP MLA to scold you.

BJP MLA: “If this is cram jihad, justice shall be done!”

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Marital Rape or the Offense of Sex Denial?

The notion of marital rape is a scam designed to destroy the institution of marriage. Marriage duty is a thing, and these duties include sex. A woman who does not want sex with her husband should file for divorce. If something must be criminalized at all, it should be denial of sex to one’s legitimate spouse, because it is fairer overall to criminalize a denial of rights than one’s getting their due.

In case so-called “rape” applies to acts of torture on occasion of sex, then said crime is torture, battery; a new crime of marital rape is not needed at all. And if the wife does not accept acts that a court would perhaps be reluctant to characterize as torture, she should file for divorce. As soon as she makes her wish to divorce known, sex without her consent could be deemed a crime. This is no “marital” rape yet because the marital duty would be suspended during the divorce procedure.

(ii)

The Indian Supreme Court is set on canceling the so-called “Exception 2 of Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC)” about rape, which decriminalizes marital rape: “Sexual intercourse or sexual act by a man with his wife, the wife not being under 15 year of age is not rape.”

The first part of this short essay (paragraphs 1 & 2) tells you about my position on the Supreme Court’s intentions. I now would like to comment on this “Exception 2.” The mention of the wife’s age is strange because: “Marriage for men below the age of 21 years and women below 18 years is a punishable offence under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006.” Even if Exception 2 mentioned the wife’s age as “being under 18,” rather than 15, that still would be strange, as it makes no sense to hypothesize a situation where the wife is under 18 because if the wife is under 18, then, given the 2006 Act, marriage is void; it is no marriage at all but rather a criminal offense, and there cannot be a “marital” rape where there is no marriage in the first place.

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Aurangzeb’s Ghost

“Police Files Case Against 8 People for Dancing with [17^th-century Mughal King] Aurangzeb’s Photo in Maharashtra.” (Times Now, YouTube)

What is their crime? I mean, “dancing with Aurangzeb’s photo” may be an obvious crime but what is it? I’m a foreigner.

Answer from a YouTube user: “Aurangzeb killed and forcefully converted many Hindus and demolished thousands of temples. This was done by all kinds of Muslim rulers actually, but celebrating and chanting slogans [praises of a man] who destroyed India, it is obvious good people with sentiments and non-Muslims will get hurt. This is the same as if one were celebrating and dancing with the picture of Osama Bin Laden, who killed thousands of Americans and destroyed the Twin Towers, and expecting Americans not to feel bad about this.”

So, the crime of dancing with Aurangzeb’s photo is incitement to terrorism (even though Aurangzeb lived more than three hundred years ago)? American law does not care about people’s feelings being hurt by this kind of political speech, because the law promotes free speech and the free flow of ideas. “Because of the First Amendment, incitement to terrorism or other forms of crime and unlawful violence is constitutionally protected free speech, unless it can be proven that the speech is ‘directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action’ and ‘is likely to incite or produce such action’.” (Wikipedia: Incitement to Terrorism) People dancing with Bin Laden’s photo in the U.S. would not be arrested or summoned, and tried, even if angry mobs wanted to lynch these people, in which case they would get police protection.

Media: There is no offence in a saffron bikini, India guarantees freedom of speech. Media: FIR [“first information report” by police] against 8 for dancing with Aurangzeb’s photo. [For an explanation of saffron bikini, see Law 29: “Saffron Bikini.”]

Year in, year out, in all museums and galleries of world capitals, there are permanent and temporary exhibits on Mughal art, Mughal miniatures, Mughal civilization, Mughal history…, but here “FIR against 8 for dancing with Aurangzeb’s photo.”

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“Ahead of the 2024 General Election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned the BJP workers against making irrelevant remarks against movies as it hampers the development agenda of the party.” (Hindustan Times, YouTube, Jan 18)

Avoid remarks on Raj Kundra porn case and Bollywood filth as if the party’s finances depended on it!

Remarks on lowbrow movies are necessary.

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Pioneering Menstrual Leave in Communist Kerala

“Pioneering Move by the Kerala Government | Menstrual Leave for College Students Announced.” (Mirror Now, YouTube)

One fails to see the point of a leave for students unless there are the same kind of truancy rules for students as for school children. In Europe, university students are free to attend the lessons or not; their presence is expected only in case of assignments. If students think they can pass exams without attending lessons, the choice is left to their own appreciation. Therefore, a leave would not make any sense there. This is not the workplace. But a menstrual leave at the workplace, which would allow women to be on paid leave about one day per month (one day out of twenty days), while their male colleagues must keep working, would have, in reaction, consequences you don’t want to imagine.

Menstrual leave for university students means there are truancy rules at Kerala universities same as for school children. Where students are free to attend lessons or not (absent individual assignments), a leave is meaningless, for you don’t need a leave where to show up is up to you. This tells you all you need to know about Communism in Kerala and its “pioneering” measures. Either they’re all children or their measures are window-dressing. Try the same at the workplace and we’ll see how frivolously shifting greater workload on men’s shoulders will be welcome.

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“Harmeet Dhillon, a prominent Indian-American attorney, has claimed attacks by her fellow Republican party leaders over her religion. Dhillon, who is running for Republican National Committee (RNC) chairwoman, has alleged that she is facing bigoted attacks because of her Sikh faith.” (Hindustan Times, YouTube)

As she says in the tweets presented in the video, she received “threats” by donors that they would stop donating if she adopted this or that line of conduct. Strange as it may seem, such kinds of threats by donors are supposedly illegal in the U.S., so a donor is supposed to give money to a candidate without knowing what the candidate’s choices will be once elected. The law was designed to prevent corruption, but what sense does it make? It’s as if a donor were blindfolded and threw a cheque in the air and the candidate on which the cheque falls could pocket it. No, people donate because they wish this or that policy, and the American anticorruption law is absurd.

As to Dhillon’s religion, as more and more GOP candidates define themselves as upholders of Christian values, you bet they find the idea of a Sikh chairperson a little odd. She can cry about discrimination but party members chose who they want as chair, and if they don’t want a Sikh woman, and even don’t conceal they don’t want her because she is a Sikh (or a woman or both), to the best of my knowledge there is no civil rights recourse open to her because the GOP is a private organization, like a club, and same as the law does not compel you to invite Sikhs at your wedding party, which is private, it does not compel you to have a Sikh chair if you don’t want a person as chair because she is a Sikh. She nonetheless has the right to complain about discrimination before the public opinion.

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According to the film The Gandhi Murder, 2019, by Karim Traïdia and Pankaj Sehgal, British and Indian police knew there was a plan to assassinate Gandhi but decided not to prevent it, that is, they are complicit in the assassination.

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Entrapped by the Commission for Women

“A day after S. M., the chief of the Delhi Commission for Women, alleged that she was harassed and dragged by a drunk driver, a video of the incident shows her confronting the man, who has been arrested. S. M. has alleged that when she tried to stop the driver, her arm was trapped in the car window [she apparently tried to grab the keys in the car] and she was dragged 15 metres.” (NDTV, YouTube, Jan 20)

This “inspection,” as the DCM chief calls it (“We keep doing inspections but this one was different, I decided to stand alone on Delhi streets. I wanted to understand what a woman goes through.”), looks like entrapment to me. This is a police job, as kerb-crawling is illegal: Is she a police officer? Even if she were, I disapprove of entrapment and many judges disapprove of it too. With these kinds of “inspections,” you prepare the police state where police entrap poor men from the lower class by promising them crores of rupees and providing them with guns and bombs, and then arrest them for terrorism for saying “yes” (when, in fact, the man only wanted to swindle them and go away with the money 🤑). I disapprove of the Commission for Women’s methods. And of S. M.’s trying to grab the driver’s keys.

Sorry but if this man is condemned there is something wrong with India. He is an altruist. Imagine you contrive a completely unnatural situation, a lone woman on the roadside in the dead of night pretending she’s waiting for her relatives to pick her up but they are not coming. The man stops his car, asking, out of human benevolence, if she needs a lift. She says she is waiting for her relatives to pick her up, so he leaves. Then, he drives by again, say fifteen minutes later. The woman is still there. Shame on her relatives to let her wait alone in the dead of night! He offers to give her a lift again because he sees that her relatives are not responding, are not reliable on this occasion (he doesn’t know it is a made-up story). She then starts to scold him and tries to grab his keys. Who in the world would not think she is a psycho and he must flee? Normally, when police start to act rough, they must shout “You’re under arrest!”, so that people realize what is happening; here I think she started acting rough without disclosing her identity and the driver thought he was assaulted.

Sorry but when you see helpless people, it is human instinct to try to help if one can, and we all know it is not safe for a woman to stand alone in the dead of night.

(ii)
Entrapment is morally wrong

Entrapment contrives unreal situations where lawful citizens are pushed by police toward acceptance of crime. The official swindlers can easily persuade you to commit a crime because they are not afraid of consequences, as they are the ones whom criminals are supposed to fear in real situations. If we were criminals designing a crime, all of us would have doubts about outcome, risks, consequences, the worth of it, even moral pangs, and at any time one or several of us may desist. When police officers entrap a man, however, they have none of these doubts: therefore, they can be persuasive as no criminal can.

The entrapped man is persuaded that crime is riskless and the reward assured, his moral balance is impaired. Police are making him willing to act, sweep all his scruples away, on the notion that the deterrent effect of the law is nonexistent. Whereas we all agree that legal deterrence plays a major role in public order, police arrest a man whom they made believe in his invulnerability. This is the old tale of Gyges’s ring in Plato: Would you act the same if you possessed a ring granting you the power of invisibility? Turns out the ring does not exist, and police were spinning a tale; the only guilt of the man they arrest is his gullibility.

The salient point about entrapment is the superpower of persuasion held by law enforcement officers as comedians, actors, a power which no criminal can have because they all stake their own lives. I am not talking about covert agents in criminal organizations, who risk their lives if uncovered; entrapment is something different. With entrapment, agents have no greater stake than the success or failure of the operation, while the “victim” of their theatrical acting wants to think in real-life terms but is presented with a picture of reality that he would never accept had a police department not intended to alter his perception, and the more incredible the lies (they can give the illusion of invulnerability because they have the state behind them, with bottomless sources of cash and arms) the more impressive they must be.

(iii)

The next day, Jan 21, the story took a new spin as some BJP members, finding that the driver was an AAP member, perhaps even AAP worker, claimed the incident was staged. (The two main political forces in Delhi currently are Hindutva BJP and Woke AAP.)

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“Just a week after China and Bhutan held a meeting and decided to push forward boundary negotiations, India’s Foreign Secretary V. M. Kwatra made a two-day visit to the Buddhist kingdom.” (NDTV, YouTube, Jan 20)

The King of Bhutan is ready to be Dictator of India at the invitation of RSS-BJP, a Buddhist party that renounced the caste system following the teachings of Gautama Buddha.

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Criminal v. Enemy

“US designates Russian Wagner mercenary force a crime organization.” (Al Jazeera English, YouTube, Jan 21)

They are defiling the language of justice by applying it to their discriminatory politics. If Wagner is a criminal organization, by the same token Blackwater (now Constellis) is a criminal organization, but as their politics is against Wagner and not against the underpinnings of the organization, which would allow a regime to criminalize Wagner and other such organizations, they are not telling the law but defiling it.

Someone, willing to establish distinctions, calls my attention on the fact that the Wagner group recruits members among prison inmates, contrary to Blackwater. This person thus believes the Wagner Group can be called a criminal organization and Blackwater otherwise. To be quite frank, he or she seems to have recanted this point of view, as the message only appears in my notifications, not on the public thread. Of course, the recruitment is completely immaterial, and the remark amusing at best, by showing how hasty reasoning (convicted recruits = criminal organization) can lead one astray. As the army itself is not infrequently a possible form of alternative punishment for convicted criminals (boot camps), the remark is even more futile. And if using the workforce of convicted criminals were itself criminal, the whole penitentiary system of the U.S. would be.

Absent a serious ground distinguishing the Wagner Group from other mercenary organizations, to label it a “criminal organization” is a misuse of law. The move shows the limits of proxy war. If America wants to act against the Wagner Group, it should declare it an enemy organization. An enemy is someone who, although they use the same means as us, acts contrary to our interests. Declaring Wagner a criminal rather than an enemy organization is contemptible on two grounds: 1) it allows U.S. to pretend staying out of the war; 2) it calls criminal an enemy, that is, someone using the same means as America (Blackwater). Again, if Wagner is criminal, Blackwater is criminal, and law enforcement that goes against one criminal and not against the other although both commit the same crime, is discriminatory.

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“US Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised alarm over Beijing’s intentions over Taipei and said China is ‘no longer comfortable’ with status quo on Taiwan.” (Hindustan Times, YouTube, Jan 22)

The U.S. is not comfortable with the status quo, as they went from “U.S. pledges support for one-China principle” to “Taiwan is a sovereign state” in November 2020. The one-China principle was the status quo, but the U.S. denounced it. This 2020 shift was an incredibly hostile move toward China. – America is the status quo breaker, but they are spinning a yarn where China is the status quo breaker. This is undignified.