The Perverted “Feminist” Attack on Modi

Their reaction to “selfie-with-daughter” is a shame and an insult to modern India. Just check how the sex ratio changed in Gujarat when Modi was Chief Minister.

It was started by Sunil Jaglan, a civil head of Bibipur—a nondescript village in Haryana, a state notorious for a very skewed gender ratio and where when a daughter is born, it often becomes a day of mourning rather than joy. ‘Selfie with daughter’ was unique, modern and symbolic.

And none other than the Prime Minister of India, inspired by this village civil head, made it into a national movement, to make Indian society realize what a source of joy and pride our daughters are. By all means of reasoning, it has to be hailed as a great innovative move towards gender equality and a clarion digital call against female infanticide that plagues developing societies.

Well…not for all.

Kavita Krishnan, the secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association, actually abused Prime Minister Modi with the perverted line ‘he has a record of stalking daughters’ and hashtagged ‘lameduck PM’. In doing that she revealed an irrational hatred which ‘the Left’ in India harbours for Modi. She was joined by actress Shruti Seth with her tweet “A selfie is not a device to bring about change Mr. PM. Try reform.” Then she hashtagged it #selfieobsessedPM.

https://twitter.com/kavita_krishnan/status/615190596408348672

In Tamil Nadu, ‘ManushyaPuthiran’ (S. Abdul Hameed) a onetime poet and now a full-timer DMK rant peddler in TV shows criticized Modi through his Facebook account :

“I do not have girl children. But I would gladly share selfies with my girlfriends would NarendraModi put them in his website in order to promote gender equality? What a comedian we have for a PM.”

What Kavita Krishnan writes is understandable. She is the editor of Liberation, the monthly publication of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), CPI (ML). The constitution of the party says that it accepts ‘Mao Tse-tung’s Thought as its guiding theoretical foundation‘.

Routledge, the UK academic publishing house, in its reputed academic biographic series has published a biography of ‘Chairman’ Mao by historian Michael Lynch (Mao, 2004). And Lynch has a chapter to document Mao’s exploitation of women. Lynch says that Mao had dance parties arranged for him with young women in his official Beijing residence, not for a few occasions but regularly ‘from 1949 until his death in 1976’.

In these parties ‘girls would come to Mao’s quarters and waltz and fox-trot with him to the accompaniment of a wind-up gramophone playing records of American dance bands.’ Then in his ‘huge bed’, Mao would ‘disport with as many girls as took his fancy and the bed would bear’ (p.218). Lynch says:

“According to his doctor, Mao’s taste in women was like his eating habits. When he liked a particular dish he would have it for days on end until he was sated. He would then push it away and try another.” (p.222)

For more (first-hand) information of Mao’s perversities, check here.

Given the fact that Kavita is the editor of the official magazine of a party that accepts Maoism as ‘guiding theoretical foundation’,should we even wonder that she cannot see but only such a perversion even in a really empowering move by the Indian PM?

Then we have the sweet advising tweet of actress Shruti Seth. In her unsolicited advice, she asks the PM to go for social reform rather than being obsessed with selfies.

Selfie with daughters is a symbolic gesture. And who knows the power of symbolism than a Gujarati? It was another Gujarati, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who used salt as a symbol to fight against the British. Of course, the ideological forerunners of Kavita Krishnan and Shruti Seth did not take it to the digital social media to hashtag Salt Satygraha as ‘bourgeoisie deception’ and Gandhi-Bose et al as ‘lackeys’ and ‘flunkeys’. Twitter and Facebook did not exist then. But they surely put those tags permanently in the print media available to them.

Coming to the present Gujarati’s symbolic gesture, he is definitely on a stronger wicket than what these self-styled attention-seeking activist-actress mafia can ever hope to achieve.

The year was 2007, and the place was a nondescript Gujarati village Devaliya. The people who were surrounding the effigy of the demon Ravan were mostly from the Patel community. It looked every bit just another ritual burning of the demon in a village festival. However, there was a difference. Here the effigy of Ravan symbolized ‘an end to the very thought of killing the girl child in the mother’s womb.’ ‘India Today‘ magazine, which reported this in its Offtrack column dated 8 October 2007, pointed out how in rural Gujarat, the Ganesh Mahotsav was being celebrated  with a social message:

Down with female foeticide, save the girl child.

The idol of Lord Ganesha was made a judge and cases of female infanticides were presented to him. The campaign heavy with mythological symbolism and innovative use of popular Hindu Gods was led by the then state Education Minister Anandiben Patel of the Modi government.

The sex ratio of Gujarat has always been skewed in favour of boys. But efforts like this by the Modi government started yielding results. In the period between 2002 to 2008, according to the annual registration survey conducted by the Registrar General of the Government of India, the sex ratio went from 844 per 1000 in 2002, to 898 per 1000 in 2008. In 2015, it has become 918 to 1000.

The Prime Minister is using selfie-symbolism to galvanize a nation against both the internal patriarchal prejudice of centuries of social stagnation and the external stereotyping of India being a nation ‘unsafe for girl child because of its culture’—a line peddled by a range of interest, from Christian missionaries to the BBC. Given the way the gender ratio has been transformed in Gujarat under Modi, we can be quite sure his government will definitely transform the gender ratio as well as gender perceptions of the nation. Selfie-with-daughter is a collective participatory step in that direction.

Meanwhile, as a side benefit, it has also exposed how the pseudo-activists and pseudo-feminists give a damn about the real empowerment of women and are blindly consumed in their well calculated self-promotional hatred for Narendra Modi.