There is much outrage over the series of ghastly crimes against women in Uttar Pradesh. Indeed, the horrific incidents that have been reported during the past week defy words of condemnation. How does one even begin to denounce something as monstrous as policemen, in collusion with thugs, raping two girls and then murdering them (they were found hanging from a tree), confident that they would get away with their grisly deed? Or a girl being raped and then forced to drink acid before the rapist decided to disfigure her face? Such are the tales that have been pouring out of Badaun and other places in India’s ‘socialist paradise’, where the Samajwadi Party rules with a massive majority and whose leader Mulayam Singh Yadav was the preferred choice of our Left-liberal intelligentsia for the Prime Minister’s job.

It would, however, be both unfair and incorrect to suggest that such crimes are of recent origin or that Uttar Pradesh has in the past not witnessed anything remotely similar. Let us not forget the terrible incidents that occurred when Mayawati was Chief Minister and the BSP was in power. A young girl was raped inside a police station and then strung up on a tree in the compound at Lakhimpur Kheri. In another incident, rapists sliced off the tongue of their victim to stop her from giving their description to the police. Another girl had her legs chopped off. It was also in Uttar Pradesh that a raped woman was told to embrace her rapist father-in-law as her husband and treat her husband as her son. Tragedies are compounded by absurdities, and a state that has abdicated responsibility and authority makes them intolerably worse.