By Sharanya Gopinathan

Yesterday, the president of the Jamat-e-Islami Hind (JIH) Atiya Siddiqua said that women who wear tight-fitting clothes are pollutants who cause harm to the society, and are responsible for the spread of AIDS and for an increase in the number of rape cases. She bemoaned the fact there is concern for air pollution and water pollution, but women who are not in purdah are the biggest cause of pollution in the country. She went on to say that men go out, and these days women also go out, so who will be at home with the kids?

It’s so impressive when someone manages to make a statement in which absolutely everything is wrong. It’s like she was hitting a checklist of crack things to say.

But like a colleague pointed out, this seems to be Crack Woman Week, so apparently anything goes. On Saturday, the vice president of the Hindu Mahasabha, Sadhvi Deva Thakur, made a series of alarmingly crack statements, such as that the Centre should declare Emergency and then force Muslims and Christians to undergo forced sterilisation in order to check the growing numbers of people from these communities in India. She went on to say that idols of Hindu gods and goddesses should be placed in mosques and churches, and that Hindus should have many children to increase their population and “have an effect on the world”. I am glad no one asked her what that effect might be.