Nabin

'It's not a lie, it's my culture'. As per my perception, India's culture is what sociologists call a 'high context culture'. It means that preserving honor, avoiding public shame, or maintaining group cohesion prevails over factual truth. This said, justifying a crime with India's high context culture -leaving aside the fact that there isn't just one, but multiple cultures in India, and satya is a central element in Hinduism- is by no means culture. It's an instrumental rationalization of a culture to legitimise a crime. In my humble opinion, by justifying the crime through his culture, he is manifesting a full lack of remorse, and it should prevent the application of mitigating factors for confession or reparation. On the other hand, he is feeding self-orientalism, this is, the idea that people coming from India are incompatible with the rule of law, which causes a damage to Indian immigrants far beyond the crimes which he is accused of. Self-orientalism -opportunistic self-orientalism, in addition- is the highest level of xenophobia, because it operates from inside. No white supremacist can harm India's image as much as this scoundrel is doing. Hindutva is providing the rhetorical & emotional framework to use India's identity to evade legal accountability. If the results are negative, the intl. indices are disputed. If the criminal is upper-caste, sanskar is invoked as a moral shield, and a long etc. And 'de esos polvos, estos lodos', we say in Spanish. This is: from those political mechanisms, these social results.