Maneka Gandhi, on the 16th of January, penned an article for Firstpost the headline of which read, “Makar Sankranti, much like Bakr Eid, is a day of cruel animal slaughter throughout India”. One could have easily assumed it was a case of random trolling written for fun but as we read the article to its end, we discover, much to our chagrin, that the author is pretty serious about the claim she has made. We could easily put it down as one of the hare-brained ideas that only Gandhis can come up with but the fact that she is a Minister in Narendra Modi’s cabinet is deeply unsettling.
We have always been bothered by Maneka Gandhi’s penchant for theatrics but it seems Narendra Modi, the alleged Hindu Hriday Samrat, is perfectly fine with having a woman in his Cabinet who treats Hindu festivals with such disdain. To have a minister in the cabinet of a Hindu Nationalist government who equates Hindu festivals with ones that involve mindless slaughter of animals is very troubling to say the least. And even more troubling is the fact that Narendra Modi doesn’t seem willing to take any action against Maneka Gandhi who has been little more than an absolute liability for his government.
Readers would remember Maneka Gandhi’s promise to combat online trolling after liberal journalists had started a mini-riot on social media in their efforts to silence opposition from rightwing accounts which exposed their hypocrisy and bias. Considering the fact that Indian liberalism is Western Progressivism with a time lag, it was only a matter of time before the SJW movement bloomed completely in India. But it seems we have a resident Social Justice Warrior (SJW) in the government itself, and no less than a Minister in the cabinet of an allegedly Hindu Nationalist Party.
Maneka Gandhi’s article is nothing short of an affront to our sensibilities as human beings with common sense and our sentiments as Hindus. She begins her article by saying, “Some months ago I saw a film which showed a loving, law abiding, white community that was allowed, by law, to go mad one day of the year and shoot any black they could. The film was about a family that rescued a black and how they were hunted down by their friendly neighbours and killed.” Only an SJW could associate such morbidity with a day which is a cause for celebration for millions and millions in the world.
I do not doubt Maneka Gandhi’s intelligence one bit, for it does take a certain amount of intelligence to invent news ways to be stupid but I do doubt her sincerity when she attempts to put Makar Sankranti on the same pedestal as Bakr Eid and implies that watching humans kill each other reminds her of Makar Sankranti.
Maneka Gandhi, who heads the Ministry of Women and Child Development, never seems to find the time to highlight the real problems faced by women and children in their everyday life but seems to exhaust the entirety of her resources on issues which only the elite women who live their entire lives in a bubble seem to be concerned about. We have never heard Maneka Gandhi discuss any viable and productive policies for the development of women or her opinions on the Muslim Personal Law Board which continues to oppress lakhs and lakhs of women in our country. But we do hear express her concern for immature women who can’t deal with trolling on Social Media and legitimize the biased narrative of Lutyens Delhi.
Recently, our traditions and culture have come under severe pressure from every wing of the secular state and foreign NGOs who seek to peddle their nefarious agenda using PILs to achieve their goals. While we were hoping for Hindu Hriday Samrat, who we had voted to power for restoring Dharma to its previous glory as much as for the sake of development, to pass an ordinance on Jallikattu permitting its practice, just to rub our noses further in the sand, one of his Ministers goes on to compare Makar Sankranti with Bakr Eid. It seems even BJP, which claims to be a Hindu Nationalist Party, milks Hindus only for votes and has little concern for our interests. Now more than ever, it feels that Hindus and their interests have been abandoned by every single arm of the secular state and democracy is being used to maintain the illusion that we have a choice in the fate of our civilization after all.
After two and a half years, hoping in vain for Narendra Modi to act for the cause of Dharma and consoling ourselves with small mercies after realizing that help from this government was never coming, even most of his hard-core supporters would agree that when a Minister in his cabinet hurts the sentiments of millions of Hindus with gross generalizations, it is a stretch too far. And as has become pretty clear, the Ministry of Women and Child Development has little utility apart from wasting the taxpayer’s hard earned money and peddling the SJW agenda. The least Narendra Modi could do is sack Maneka Gandhi immediately for the horrendous article she has penned but by now, I have realized even that is asking for too much from this government.