So here it is, the latest farce from the subcontinent. An Indian bride’s mother-in-law is arrested. The British legal establishment is frothing at the mouth, dispatching human rights monitors as if they were delivering pamphlets for a lost cause.
And the media, as ever, laps it up like a starved dog at a butcher’s door. One must ask: have we learned nothing from the Victorians, or from the fall of Rome? The spectacle of Western barristers descending on Delhi to lecture on ‘rights’ is not new.
It is the colonial impulse dressed in the robes of moral superiority. The truth is, this case is a Rorschach test for modernity. For some, it is a simple matter of justice gone wrong.
For others, it is a microcosm of the decay of the Indian legal system, where tradition and law wrestle in the mud of populist sentiment. But for the truly perceptive, it is a mirror held up to our own intellectual decadence. We look at India and see its chaos.
They look at us and see our hypocrisy. The human rights brigade will demand due process. But process is a luxury of stable societies.
In a nation where 30,000 dowry deaths are reported annually, process is a ghost. The mother-in-law may be innocent. Or she may be guilty.
That is not the point. The point is the ritualised performance of justice, the catharsis of punishment. We are living in an age of simulated morality, a world where the gesture is more important than the outcome.
The UK’s human rights monitors will write their reports. The news channels will move on to the next atrocity. And the wheel will turn.
We are all actors in a play written by history. The only difference is some of us are aware of it.
