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World of the News

~ For the universal in today's top stories

Tag Archives: India

#18 Strange Fruit, Terrible Freedom

June 1, 2014

Strange fruit hanging from the mango tree. Villagers gathered in a circle around its bitter crop, congregating as if for Harvest Festival. In the front row a girl of seven or eight looks up, awestruck.

The awful thing that strikes me, looking down at a photograph of this scene in Northern India, is the beauty of the two human forms which the young girl is gazing up at. Dressed in colourful shalwar kameez (turquoise and crimson and purple), they float upon the breeze, heads bowed in a picture of modesty.But these are the corpses of the two teenage cousins of Katra, a remote village in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh; low caste Dalits who were gang raped, then hung until dead with ropes slung over the lower branches of a nearby tree – in a grove of mangoes only 250m from where they lived.

When the low caste girls were first reported missing on the night of 27 May, their plight was ignored by police officers who belong to the higher caste of Yadav. Even when they were found murdered, the police were slow to respond; hence the solemn vigil ofpoor villagers who would not allow the girls’ bodies to be cut down until their death was registered across the world.

Since then the authorities have been keen to be seen leaping into action. Arrests made, suspects displayed; two of them shown roped together – boyish, sheepish and unkempt; strung out by what is happening to them (but at least they have not been strung up).

In the cool of the evening, the girls had gone out into the fields to defecate. Not that Father was in the lavatory reading the News of the Screws. Pull the other one! In theplace they called home there simply is no sanitation.

Hours later they were swinging free of the trials and tribulations of rural poverty: no longer yoked to heat and dust; cut loose from the dumb repetition of agricultural toil.

Continually coercive drudgery, lives lived by a thousand and one degradations, punctuated by short and nasty episodes of brutal violence. This combination amounts to a whole way of being for millions of the rural poor.

Didn’t it kill the two teenagers of Katra as much as the criminals who kidnapped them?

#1 Heavyweight

March 1, 2014

‘I am not that human being, who will abscond.’ So said ‘flamboyant tycoon’ Subrata Roy Sahara in a statement issued before his arrest in Lucknow yesterday for failing to repay billions of bonds to India’s small investors.

Though his arrest made national ‘news of the day’ (Roy’s remand and the prospect of the Indian tiger ‘losing its stripes’ in a further economic slowdown), Roy himself seems not of our time.

His moustache belongs in a wartime wardroom – or perhaps the members’ lounge of a post-war Home Counties golf club; his (surely) dyed black hair is bouffed up for an American boardroom in the 1970s; and his way with words – see above – is based either on elderly Hindi phrases, or the Anglo-Indian habit of learning English like it’s Latin (in Britain this tradition died out 50 years ago), or both. As for the broad lapels on the black sleeveless jackets he likes to wear over short-sleeved white shirts and a company tie, they are as anachronistic as the gull-wing doors on a DeLorean; though less likely to drop off. Of mockery an almost too easy target I am, as Roy might have said of himself. Except he almost certainly wouldn’t say it because saying it of himself implies a level of self-consciousness in keeping with the widespread Western selfie-ishness which he himself seems barely conscious of. Yet for all his gaucherie there is something incontrovertible about Roy – a substance that comes from employing 1.1 million people in his Sahara conglomerate (hotels to aviation). More than a million people earn their living from being in his employ; enough to make his being a matter of fact, rather than the subject of speculation, self-examination or some other ‘First World‘ trait. Compared to the unbearable lightness of being a Londoner – living on thin air and thetiniest share in a bubbling property market – goofy, bouffy Subrata Roy is a world heavyweight.

The quick and the dead

January 12, 2013

The Singapore hospital is as squeaky clean as its corporate PR: Mount Elizabeth, a parkway health hospital. The dark blue van marked ‘Hindu casket’ matches the uniforms of the men loading her body into it (blue shroud, of course). But from here on, life and death get messier. At the funeral parlour in Singapore, while the corpse is being embalmed, the Indian official inspecting the coffin has brought his shopping with him in see-thro’ plastic bags. Next: the deceased is returned to her residence. The city which the body is brought back to, is garlanded with electric wires; growing thickly across the New Delhi street where she lived. The last journey to the cremation ground, in yet another hospital van, takes place in the half-light before dawn. Roads lined with more police than mourners; the cremation ground guarded by rifle-at-the-ready troops from India’s Border Force. Mass migration to the kingdom of the dead? No, only the body of the Delhi rape victim, to be tidied up on the purifying pyre. But this is not the end, thankfully. Out on the motley streets, a 20something woman demonstrator with a stick in one hand and an iPhone in the other. The stick is useless: would snap like a twig if it even grazed a police helmet. But the woman who’s shouting a slogan can’t stop herself grinning when she sees the camera pointing her way: she’s having the time of her life.

India, what time is it?

December 22, 2012

‘Lathicharge’ sounds ceremonial but turns out to mean New Delhi police officers beating back the crowd with sticks as tall as they are. Legs planted firmly apart, leaning back slightly then swivelling forward from the hips to get a good scything motion. On his way down, one demonstrator is still talking into his phone. There’s another one, also still talking, as he manages to throw a tear gas canister back at the police. Earlier, protestors seemed surprised to find they had broken through police lines across Raisina Hill, the thoroughfare leading up to the presidential palace (built for the British viceroy by imperial architect Edward Lutyens). Before they made it to the top, the police retaliated with tear gas canisters. When demonstrators defused these by dowsing them with water, they moved on to water cannon and lathis. But the crowd was not cowed. One teenaged girl was overheard encouraging her companion: ‘Aaja, aaja. Thhoda ro lenge, koi baat nahin (Come, come. We’ll cry a little, it’s fine)’. The ultra-violent gang-rape of a 23-year-old paramedical student and the lackadaisical police inquiry into this brutal crime, have prompted mounting protests against the authorities’ relaxed attitude towards ‘eve teasing’ – the almost-accepted term for a gamut of sexual harassment from bum-pinching to grievous assault. With their smartphones, wearing ‘street clothes’ rather than street clothes, the mainly middle class protestors of New Delhi would not look out of place in London or Manhattan. They are facing an elite which continues to inhabit structures inherited from the British Raj. Meanwhile the paramilitary stance of the police – that scything motion – still owes something to pre-modern regimes. In India, in the final days of 2012, time comes in three dimensions. read more

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