There is a hole in the Prime Minister’s soul

That cannot be filled.

We must all concede

To his greed

His limitless hungry need

For love. 

All the time.

It is very difficult to watch the video of a fifteen year old girl apologizing to the nation, and then look at Narendra Modi’s Instagram post in which he proffers forgiveness to the “shararati bacche” of the nation. The video in which a 15 year old girl is made to apologize with folded hands, and her mother made to thank the Prime Minister for his magnanimity, is deeply disturbing because it reveals the true sociopathy that lives inside this man. And what lives inside him is a hatred of women and a desire for control and dominance so pathological that it derives its satisfaction from this. What satisfaction is a 75 year old man, the prime minister of a nation, with the full force of the state and its violence behind him, deriving from the video of a 15 year old girl begging forgiveness? 

Who is a “shararati baccha”? What drives Narendra Modi’s need to infantilize the adults who gathered on Jantar Mantra, specifically daughters, and teach them lessons? What is the actual lesson that Narendra Modi wishes to teach the betis of this country? The psyche acts towards it’s own satisfaction. What is the nature of pleasure that accompanies this video of a 15-year old child as she is taught a lesson? 

Insulting language is not a crime. Narendra Modi is owed no apologies from anyone. However, why is the law and the goons not demanding apologies from the young men, legions of them, chanting, “Neem ka patta kadwa hai, Narendra Modi ***** hai”? We know the answer to this question. Feminists have given us the weapons to diagnose it. But despite the tools that feminism has given us so we can look squarely at the forms that patriarchy takes, this video produces a visceral revulsion at the psychopathology of this regime and the man who presides over it.

The goons arriving at the doors of women demanding apologies are extensions of the prime minister. The men issuing rape threats to 15 year old girls are psychic prosthetics of the prime minister. They are doing the psychic bidding of a man who speaks of women’s bodies in an obscene fashion. Who obsesses about the sexual lives of women by calling a woman a 50 crore girlfriend. A man who compares a woman to a Jersey Cow, and then talks about her “hybrid child”. A man who demands that a 15 year old girl beg his forgiveness in public. And then her mother be made to thank him for giving her daughter a “Jeevan dan”. This pervert is the Prime Minister of our country. And in the 12 years of his regime he has gathered around himself an incel army that embodies every perverted form that masculinity takes. 

At least one strand of the murderous rage the ruling regime feels for the young people gathered at Jantar Mantra has to do with the nature of masculinity that characterized that space. Instead of the obscenity that characterizes this regime, what happened at the CJP protests at Jantar Mantra was the modeling of a masculinity that is not scared, embarrassed, or disgusted by women’s bodies and what they may need. And unlike the toxic obsession that the right-wing has with women’s bodies and the horrific things they want to do to them, this masculinity does not sexualize every encounter with it. Like the young man, he must not have been more than 16 years old, who was offering sanitary towels to women. I thanked him and said I didn’t need them, to which he replied, “Abhi nahin to kabhi to zaroorat padegi. Hamare paas bahut hai, aap ek le lijiye. Aur aapko nahin zaroorat to kissi aur ko de dijiye.” Compare the care in these words said to a woman thirty years older than him, with the desire of the Prime Minister to teach young girls lessons in which they beg forgiveness.

At Jantar Mantar, there were two queues to enter the space of the CJP protest enclosed by the barricades, one for men and one for women. The young men who were the volunteers responsible for crowd management, immediately took women through the women’s entrance. I had come that night with my brother and I hesitated for a moment when I was asked to go through, because our phones weren’t working and I wanted to coordinate where to meet. Regardless, this young man must have thought I was worried about my safety. Because he looked at me and said, “Ye Kumbh Mela nahi hai, aapka bhai aapko andar mil jayega, promise.” By this he did not mean that I would not get lost in the crowd. He meant that I would not be encountering the Sanatan Hindu masculinity that is issuing rape threats, hunting down young women, and demanding that they perform their abjection for the Prime Minister. 

All societies have pathological tendencies, as all societies have resources for life. In the twelve years of his rule, Narendra Modi has viralized every pathological tendency there exists——of casteism, of misogyny, of islamophobia, xenophobia, racism. The tactic of control has been to make the social body sick with fear and normalize more and more depraved forms of violence against Dalits, against Muslims, women, Kashmiris, people fighting for their land, transpeople, farmers, students, teachers, anyone and everyone who asks any questions about this regime. The protests at Jantar Mantar are so terrifying to this regime because they displayed a moral compass in a nation which feared it had lost one. And they showed that social depravity has a location. That location is the Prime Minister and the entire ecosystem that has birthed and sustained him. To quote a slogan from Jantar Mantra, “BJP ke daftar mein.” But society has managed, despite the pathogens released by the PMO, to recover a space for ethical action and care for each other. Jantar Mantra is terrifying to the toxic insecure masculinity that drives the vaanar sena and its 56-inch Senapati, because it is a world in which women can talk about their periods, and young men can offer them sanitary pads when they need them. And in response the regime reasserts its right to derive pleasure from the humiliation of girls and women by making a 15 year old girl beg forgiveness. The list of unforgivable things that Modi and this regime have done is long. This is high on that list.