Words are utilitarian. They mean what they say, unless they sound what they mean, if onomatopoeic. ‘Kidnap’ crept into English insidiously, through the satanic mesh of 17th century sugar colonization of the West Indies.

Sugar was synonymous with the eternal god of human affairs, profit. Cheap labor added hugely to the bottom line. British merchants were not racists: they brutalized their own poor as rapaciously as they caged natives of another hue in lands they conquered. Even the patrician symbol of republicanism, Oliver Cromwell, killed one out of ten prisoners he took in the British civil war and sold nine to slavery in sugar fields. But nothing was more heart-rending than kidnap: young children, kids, were literally stolen off impoverished streets in an unguarded moment (a ‘nap’ moment); their tears were whipped off faces on the long journey to slow death. On such auspicious foundations was the edifice of modern capitalism constructed.

But we in India of the 21st century are socialists, albeit mild ones. We pulsate with liberal legislation and throb with democracy. We do not pick up single children for slavery. Our democratic leaders kidnap whole communities and drive from the 21st century into the 17th.

Child marriage is one of those social evils with a 19th century flavour, although it was not till after 1947 that the practice was challenged through public campaigns. Progress is not best measured in electric watts. It is either the march of the human spirit away from chains like child abuse and gender oppression, or it is nothing. But Indian democracy has generated a greed for votes that much surpasses need. Our politicians compromise as they pander to the meanest sectarian sentiment: a khap here, a biradari there, a sangathan around the corner. As the mind gets smaller, the audience gets bigger, for voters are also like a child taking a nap which will be broken only by the scream of a nightmare.

Another one beckons. The Indian Union Muslim League, a partner of the present UPA government and loyal ally of Congress in both Delhi and Kerala, has banded together a group of fellow travellers in order to reverse the ban on child marriage for Muslims. Why? These revanchist worthies believe that child marriage is permissible under Islamic law, or sharia.

This is scarcely believable. Almost every Muslim nation has banned child marriage. Are Muslims living in Bangladesh or Malaysia or Senegal or Egypt or Kazakhstan any less Muslim because of the ban? One of the myths perpetrated by Muslim extremists is that Islamic law is frozen. This is nonsense. The Sunni code includes the concept of Ijtihad, a form of honest and rigorous due diligence based on independent reasoning. Anyone competent enough to so interpret the sharia is called a Mujtahid. Slavery was legal when the Holy Quran was given to mankind. Today slavery is illegal in the Muslim world. And no one cuts off hands for theft.

Surely the Indian Union Muslim League knows that it lives in India, and that this nation is no longer in the 1940s or indeed the 1980s, when the politics of hysteria managed to reverse a Supreme Court judgment providing a very basic alimony to a woman called Shah Bano. That was the last hurrah of fundamentalists. Since then Indian courts have cited the progressive principles of sharia to advance alimony rights, and the extreme has chosen to respond with silence.

Such retrograde demands cannot be about the welfare of the people. They must, therefore, be about politics. The Muslim League is clearly beginning to feel the heat from voters as general elections approach, and beyond them the Assembly polls in Kerala. It is pandering to false religiosity in the hope that this will divert the voter from real issues. Politicians are at their most dangerous when they face defeat, as we are witnessing on a much larger scale in national politics: they do not care if they set fire to social cohesion or to economic growth, as long as they can ensure that they leave only dust and ashes for their successors. This is democratic process degraded.

Our Election Commission prohibits a politician from provoking hatred towards another community during a campaign. Hate speech can lead to annulment of an election. But what is the price for the betrayal of one’s own community when the search for votes enters squalid and poisonous swamps? Instead of a price, there is reward.

The solution is obviously not simple. There is no point in expecting this necessary change through legislation, because this trick is too supple to be pinned. But if the politician at the top cannot, or will not, find the answer, the voter can. Such politics withers if it cannot flourish. WE are again being driven towards a populist hijack. The sooner we wake up from any nap, the better.