Friday 12 March 2010

Ladies First

Good to hear the all-female Question Time audience cheer a questioner who clearly expected an affirmative answer to "shouldn't women be selected and elected on their merits?" She received such an answer from the audience, but not from the half-male panel. Says it all, really.

Meanwhile, the quota system in India is kicking in. Opposition to it is coming from the Leftist parties there, who are, it must be said, a rum lot. The Communist Party of India is Stalinist. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) is a Maoist secession from the Communist Party of India and maintains a vicious militia in West Bengal, but its recently deceased grand old man, Jyoti Basu, very nearly became Prime Minister as lately as 1996, a fact which, like the strength of these parties generally, demands to be kept in mind among so many others as India rises to world power status.

The Revolutionary Socialist Party of India is a half-digestion of Trotskyism by Bengal's pre-existing Anushilan movement of not just Hindu, but explicitly Brahmin, nationalists. And the All India Forward Bloc is the continuation of personality of Subhas Chandra Bose, so much the Strasser of Bengal that he ran the Indian National Army, a force which fought for the Japanese during the War; let us all understand that statues and other images of him are much-seen in India, and that there is a significant campaign, backed by all four Leftist parties, to have his birthday declared a public holiday.

So it is with no pleasure that we must acknowledge the correctness of these parties in their opposition to the women's quota. It is, they say, a device for imposing upper-middle-class, high-caste people who happen to be women, but who have in fact been chosen by other party's machines for the upper-middle-classness and their high-casteness, and have no prior connections to the communities that they seek to represent.

To which those machines reply that no such candidate, male or female, could win a poor, working-class or low-caste constituency. Have the people saying this ever been to Britain? Most of them have been. So they know perfectly well that they are lying. And we all know why they are doing so. Oh, yes, they have to Britain, all right.

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