India provides a silver lining to dark clouds

The clouds of global politics just seem to get darker. The partly understandable but appalling drift to populism across continents continues relentlessly.

Trump lashes out as he is trashed anonymously by a senior White House adviser who outlines the sheer awfulness of his presidency. We are protected apparently only by the actions of White House staffers who, with ‘quiet resistance’,  work around the president’s ‘amorality’. Yet his popularity amongst core supporters remains undiminished.

In Europe, the Far Right advance with riots in the German town of Chemnitz. They are present in the anarchy of Italian politics and are predicted to make major gains even in traditionally liberal Sweden. They run or part run governments in Poland, Hungary and Austria.

In the UK, Putin continues his thuggery with the now proven attempted assignation of Russian nationals by his gangster State, killing a vulnerable British woman in the process.

And there is Brexit… Here we are, watching with growing incredulity, contingency planning for the stockpiling of medicines and food in the event of a no-deal EU exit, advocated by many in the Tory Party. The only opposition to the government’s reckless actions is the Labour Party, hopelessly mired in self-inflicted anti-Semitism and hard left ideological disputes.

Wow. Not even a week has gone by since the summer break!

But no further comment on all this for now…. There is little new to say until further events unfold.

So let’s focus on an immensely solid and heart warming silver lining that has gone fairly unnoticed.

India’s Supreme Court has just ruled that a colonial-era law criminalising homosexual sex is unconstitutional. This is a huge victory for the LGBT community who have battled to have this law overturned for 20 plus years. It also unanimously confirmed that India’s LGBT community has a fundamental right to equality, dignity, self-expression and privacy. Even Modi’s conservative inclined government chose to sit on the side-lines as the rulings were announced, leaving it to the ‘court’s wisdom’. This in the knowledge that popular opinion was supportive of the judgements.

So a nation with a population of 1.4 billion, almost certain to be a future super power, takes a great step forward in embracing equality and social liberalism. There are silver linings and this is a major one. Worth celebrating amongst the gloom.