Tag Archives: india

Suitable tale for Hallowe’en

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According to the BBC

Five women were paraded naked, beaten and forced to eat human excrement by villagers after being branded as witches in India’s Jharkhand state.
Local police said the victims were Muslim widows who had been labelled as witches by a local cleric. (from the BBC)

This poses an interesting question. Does Islam have “witches?” Are they mentioned in the Koran? (I have no idea. I am too idle to googleit even)

The BBC has a video but I’m such a wuss that the warning that it contains disturbing footage was enough to stop me playing it. The video has understandably outraged people in India.

According to more links on that BBC page, witch persecution is not uncommon in India today. For instance, the BBC story “Witch family killed” reported the deaths of four people, who were stoned and buried alive in June 2008.

More than 500 people have been killed in Assam – and half as many in neighbouring West Bengal – in the past few years because their neighbours thought they were witches.
A study on these killings by a Bengal police officer, Asit Baran Choudhury, suggests that most of those accused of practising witchcraft and then killed are “isolated families” with some landed property.
He says most of those killed are widows.
“Powerful people in the community target them to acquire the land,” says the study. (from the BBC, 12 June 2008)

These horrific tales don’t need commenting on. It’s blindingly obvious what’s going on here. I could refer you to the mountains of anthropological literature about persecution of “witches”. The European witch trials were so similar in terms of targetting widows and grabbing property. But any mention of “anthropology” or “history” places this sort of madness in a conceptual realm that’s outside our own experience – in the distant past or in some “superstitious” alien society that is nothing like the modern world (Ha.)

In any case, I tend to assume that most readers are halfway sane so I won’t do this to death. Feel free to work up your own outrage. I’m getting a bit tired at expressing outrage at things so WRONG that they defy any sense of innate human decency. And I choose not to go down that road, as a matter of principle.

How monumentally convenient for someone who is jealous of another’s good fortune to make up insane accusations and convince the gullible that they are true.

Let them eat ID cards

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Another crazy ID scheme, this time in India.

ID cards planned for India’s 1.1 billion
Hi-tech entrepreneur will lead operation to create huge database (headings from the story in the Independent)

Here the rationale is not just “terrorism” but also a claim that ID cards will benefit the poor.

…..will help in the delivery of vital social services to the poorest in society who often lack – or are at least told they lack – sufficient identification papers. The government has long complained that most of the money set aside for the neediest is diverted as a result of corruption, and it believes the cards could help to tackle identity theft and fraud.

Hmm. An impressive sleight of hand in “ID-card justification” creation, although the Indian government is clearly following a model similar to the UK one. The “fighting poverty” argument is:
(1) Corruption prevents relief of poverty.
(2) ID cards will prevent identity theft and fraud.

Where is the logical connection between 1 and 2?

I will temporary defy logic and try my best to look at the argument from the pro-ID card side.

Even on the assumption that corruption is the only bar to stopping poverty (which is a big and unjustified leap of faith) doesn’t that make dealing with corruption the main priority?

To get from priority 1 to priority 2, you would have to assume that “identity theft” is the only way that “corruption” works.

You would also have to assume that no “corruption” could possibly be involved in handing over billion dollar contracts to major industrialists.

(This is a leap of faith that is far beyond my jumping abilities. Silly me, I would have assumed that pumping resources in to relieve poverty and to stamp out corruption would be the intuitive way to go. You live and learn, hey?)

You would have to assume that identification documents wouldn’t become another incomprehensible/insurmountable burden for the very poorest that would probably make it even harder for them to access resources. (ditto… This is a leap of faith ….)

And you also need to believe that this won’t give rise to a new set of forms of corruption – in distributing ID documents, forging them, and so on.

Which might illustrate an admirable capacity for inventiveness in the face of survival pressures. But it’s quite hard to see how creating new forms of criminal industry would otherwise bring any benefit to the Indian poor.

The Independent says that the poor ” often lack – or are at least told they lack – sufficient identification papers.”

This scheme will provide a whole new set of identification papers for the poor to be told that they lack, then. From the perspective of the poor, this is a scheme that you could best characterise as “adding insult to injury.”

Cow juice

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Without being at all convinced this story is true, I can’t resist repeating it…. The Times says that Hindu Nationalists are about to launch a soft drink made from cows’ piss.

In 2001, the RSS and its offshoots – which include the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party – began promoting cow urine as a cure for ailments ranging from liver disease to obesity and even cancer.

The claim is that it will be healthy and cheap.

(Hmm. If the health argument is founded on the likelihood that drinking cow’s piss will cure cancer or liver disease, what is there to say? Obesity is a different matter. It might be hard to keep down any food after you’d forced yourself to swallow a cup of cow’s piss, so maybe you’d lose weight through starvation.

Cheap? Quite possibly, but, as you couldn’t pay most people enough to drink it, charging anything at all seems a doomed marketing strategy.)

He insisted, however, that it would be able to compete with the American cola brands, even with their enormous advertising budgets. “We’re going to give them good competition as our drink is good for mankind,” he said. “We may also think of exporting it.”

Many of the comments on the Times article are surprisingly in favour of the idea. (Do I suspect a comment-based marketing impetus?)

And oh joy! 😀 Just when you thought there was at least one area of life that the anti-PC brigade couldn’t spew out their gibberish, one commenter says:

Cow’s urine or anyone’s urine! Never in a thousand years! Yuck!! The world has indeed gone mad. What else will they think about? The politically correct bunch will no doubt embrace it and force it on us. Just wait and see. John Lim, Carlsbad, US

Amazingly, it’s actually easier to get your head round the prospect of drinking cows’ piss than it is to see the tortured logic in that.