Last year, just before Narendra Modi's victory in India's general election, I had written in an article, Gender violence and Narendra Modi, about what life might be like in the country if he were elected. Now, some eighteen months later, it is clear that my fears were more than justified.
If the run up to the election was horrifying in its violence, today things are infinitely worse. Among the many horrifying incidents, in the last six weeks alone, were three pre-planned lynchings, on the pretext of allegations of the consumption of beef, the burning alive of a 9 month and 2 year old brother and sister simply for being Dalits, and the digging up and subsequent rape of the body of a recently buried Muslim woman.
Narendra Modi has had little to say about these atrocities, but senior members of his cabinet and BJP MPs have responded with chilling contempt - after the burning to death of the Dalit children, for example, External Affairs Minister VK Singh likened their murders to someone throwing a stone at a dog.
