Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday condemned a spate of rapes as a source of shame for India and urged an end to communal violence, as he vowed to improve the lives of the nation’s poor in his first Independence Day speech.
Modi, the son of a tea vendor who come to power in May, also delivered a withering assessment of the ruling establishment from the ramparts of New Delhi’s 17th-century Red Fort as he addressed often taboo subjects such as sexual violence, feticide, religious unrest and a lack of toilets.
The Hindu nationalist also restated his solidarity with the wider South Asian region, but held back from mentioning India’s great rival Pakistan, which is also celebrating its independence 68 years ago.
Photo: AFP
In one of the most eye-catching passages of a 45-minute speech, Modi said levels of rape had shamed India, and he urged parents to take responsibility for the behavior of their sons rather than put the onus on their daughters.
“When we hear about these rapes our heads hang in shame,” Modi said.
“The law will take its own course, but as a society every parent has a responsibility to teach their sons the difference between right and wrong,” he said.
Photo: EPA
Anger over sexual violence has been rising in the past two years, fueled by a series of high-profile assaults, including the fatal gang-rape of a student on a bus in Delhi in December 2012.
And there was widespread outrage in May when two teenagers were found hanging from a mango tree after being gang-raped in Uttar Pradesh.
The girls, who were aged 14 and 15, were attacked while going to the toilet in fields after dark as — like hundreds of millions of Indians — they did not have a toilet in their own home.
“We are in the 21st century and yet there is still no dignity for women as they have to go out in the open to defecate and they have to wait for darkness to fall. Can you imagine the number of problems they have to face because of this?” Modi told the assembled VIPs.
“People may criticize me for talking about toilets from the Red Fort. But I am from a poor family, I have seen poverty first hand. For the poor to get dignity, it has to start from here,” he said.
Modi said India should strive to ensure that every household should have a toilet within the next four years and pledged to ensure that all schools had separate toilet facilities for girls and boys.
The prime minister also called for a change in mindset in a country where a baby boy is still sometimes seen as more of a blessing than a girl, particularly in rural areas.
Despite laws banning parents from finding out the sex of their unborn child, Modi said only 940 girls were being born for every 1,000 boys.
“Who is responsible for this imbalance in our society? I urge the doctors and mothers not to sacrifice their daughters for sons,” the prime minister said.
Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, has also been the scene of several recent flare-ups in communal violence between Hindus and minority Muslims.
Before becoming prime minister, Modi was chief minister of the western state of Gujarat where he was in charge in 2002 during one of India’s deadliest chapters of communal violence since independence.
However, in his speech, Modi said communal violence was “stalling the growth of the nation” and had gone on for “too long.”
While Modi was accused by his opponents during the election of being too business-friendly, he said his government would take action to allow even the poorest members of society to open a bank account.
Hundreds of farmers have committed suicide in the lpast decade in a trend that Modi attributed to their inability to pay back private loans.
“We will have a prime minister’s people wealth scheme so that even the poorest of the poor can have a bank account of their own,” Modi said.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
‘PLAINLY ERRONEOUS’: The justice department appealed a Trump-appointed judge’s blocking of the release of a report into election interference by the incoming president US Special Counsel Jack Smith, who led the federal cases against US president-elect Donald Trump on charges of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat and mishandling of classified documents, has resigned after submitting his investigative report on Trump, an expected move that came amid legal wrangling over how much of that document can be made public in the days ahead. The US Department of Justice disclosed Smith’s departure in a footnote of a court filing on Saturday, saying he had resigned one day earlier. The resignation, 10 days before Trump is inaugurated, follows the conclusion of two unsuccessful criminal prosecutions
RSS