Worse than China.

In the last few days there has been an uproar over comments by our most revered Home Minister in which he reportedly said that the middle class is ready to spend Rs 20 on an ice cream cone but unwilling to pay Re 1 more for a kilo of rice or wheat. The minister was " shocked and disgusted by the deliberate distortion " of his words and stressed that he said," We are prepared.....". He is so modest at including himself in the middle class but he forgets some basic facts. 1. Ice cream is optional and maybe omitted from the diet but wheat and rice are essential elements of the Indian diet, especially the poor who can no longer afford chicken, meat or milk because of inflation and 2. Ice cream is loved by children who can be kept happy by making it at home but wheat and rice have to be bought. China has brought inflation to below 3% while we struggle to survive with CPI at over 10% but our millionaire politicians cannot comprehend what we are complaining about. However, Bengal is now the leader in sheer brutality. A woman called Pinki Pramanik was accused by another woman of actually being a man and raping her. Pinki was arrested and says that she was forcefully examined at a private hospital where the police tied her arms and legs apart. She has been released on bail which would seem to imply that the charges are false and she is indeed a woman. Instead of announcing the results and apologising the Sports Minister of Bengal, Madan Mitra has accused her of selling land leased to her free of cost by the state. HT, 12 July. Also in Bengal, a 10 year old girl, Punita Mistri was forced to lick her own urine as a punishment for bed wetting at Patha Bhavan School at Shantiniketan. The distraught girl is now refusing to go back to school for fear of being mocked by her classmates. Registrar of Visva Bharati, Mani Mukut Mitra and school principal, Bodhirupa Sinha visited the girl's home but offered no apology. Instead the school has complained to the police who are applying pressure on the girl's father, Manoj Mistri to return her to the school. Clearly it is a blatant attempt by the authorities to trivialise the whole incident so that the controversy would die down. If teachers are so brutally insensitive towards a little girl what are students going to learn? It is not surprising that Bengal leads as the most barbaric state. When a 37 year old woman was gang raped on leaving a nightclub on Park Street in Kolkata on 5 February the Chief Minster, Mamata Banerjee ridiculed the story as a " conspiracy to malign her government " and then transferred the Joint Commissioner of Police ( Crime ), Damayanti Sen for proving that the woman had indeed been raped. Where the leaderene leads others will follow. Barbarians.