Deadly caste riots rock India

After two days of caste-related riots that left eight people dead in the Indian state of Gujarat, calm is slowly returning. However, a curfew remains in place and the Internet has been blocked in some areas. And many residents are furious.

Protests began in Ahmedabad, with members of the Patel caste [the caste system is a system of social stratification and impacts people’s occupations] demanding quotas in public universities and in government jobs. The influential Patels, a caste that also own a lot of the region’s land and diamond businesses, are not among the Indian castes considered as being disadvantaged, which benefit from quotas (also known in India as “reservations”.)

A Patel rally held on Tuesday evening quickly degenerated into clashes with the police after the protest movement’s leader Hardik Patel was arrested. Rioting quickly spread to other towns in the state, and dozens of police stations and vehicles were set ablaze. Hardik Patel was freed later in the night, but clashes continued into Wednesday, when government forces were brought in and a curfew installed. Parts of Ahmedabad still have limited Internet access, in an effort the authorities say is meant to stop incendiary messages from spreading via social media.

Much more at france24.com

Kodaikanal

Sign the petition asking for Unilever to clean up the mercury poisoning in Kodaikanal: http://www.jhatkaa.org/unilever/.
Written by Chennai-born rapper Sofia Ashraf and set to Nicki Minaj's “Anaconda,” the video takes an undisguised jab at Unilever for its failure to clean up mercury contamination or compensate workers affected by its thermometer factory in Kodaikanal.

The People Who Live On This Island Will Kill Anyone Who Tries To Come Ashore

North Sentinel Island, located in the Bay of Bengal, between Myanmar and Indonesia, is home to an isolated tribe that has never been colonized or even made contact with. These people are one of the last Stone Age tribes on Earth whose culture has been completely untouched by modern civilization. Despite the fact that the island formally belongs to India, no one dares to visit it and approach the Sentinelese tribe. The reason is their extreme violence and hostility – anyone who has ever tried to come ashore the island was attacked or even killed.

The Sentinelese are believed to have lived on the island for 60,000 years! After this unthinkable period of time in isolation, it’s no surprise that they are so hostile to outsiders, which may be due to past conflicts with the outside world. In order to protect the Tribe and prevent unnecessary violence, the Indian government has also made it illegal to approach it closer than three miles. Due to the inability to study the tribe and the island, we don’t know much about them.

It is estimated that the tribe counts between 50 and 400 members and lives exclusively by hunting and gathering. Though it is difficult to observe the island from the air because of the dense tree cover, it is established that the Sentinelese are not familiar with agriculture. Their drive to protect their culture from the outside world is probably the reason they have survived in isolation for so many years. Who knows how long they will manage to live in the middle of the ocean without having the slightest interest in the “civilized” rest of the world. And perhaps being without contact with us is a good thing.

More at The Mind Unleashed, survivalinternational.org and dailymail.co.uk

India Asks YouTube To Remove Delhi Rape Documentary

India has asked YouTube to remove all links to a controversial documentary about the gang rape and murder of a woman in Delhi after banning its broadcast, a government official told Reuters on Thursday.
Leslee Udwin's "India's Daughter" features an interview with Mukesh Singh, one of four men sentenced to death for the rape and torture of a 23-year-old woman on a moving bus in December 2012.
Comments released to the media show that Singh blames the victim for the crime. He says that women are more responsible than men for rape.
"We just forwarded the court order and asked them (YouTube) to comply," an official at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology told Reuters.

More at Huff. Post

It’s Her Fault She Was Gang Raped, Says Rapist

"Indian authorities ordered television stations Tuesday not to broadcast a documentary about a gang rape on a New Delhi bus in which one of the attackers blames the victim and says she could have avoided being killed if she had not fought back, a government official said.
The order followed an outcry over giving a convicted prisoner a nationwide platform to express repugnant views about a horrific crime that shocked Indians and prompted hundreds of thousands to take to the streets in protest. In response to the 2012 attack, India's government rushed through legislation doubling prison terms for rapists to 20 years and criminalizing voyeurism, stalking and the trafficking of women.” *

The Young Turks

India mass sterilisation: women were ‘forced’ into camps, say relatives

Relatives of the 12 women who died after a state-run mass sterilisation campaign in India went horribly wrong have told local media they were forced by health workers to attend the camp. More than 80 women underwent surgery for laparoscopic tubectomies at a free government-run camp in the central state of Chhattisgarh on Saturday. About 60 fell ill shortly afterwards, officials said. At least 14 were in a very serious condition by Wednesday and the death toll was expected to rise.

“The [health workers] said nothing would happen, it was a minor operation. They herded them like cattle,” Mahesh Suryavanshi, the brother-in-law of one casualty, told the Indian Express newspaper. Such camps are held regularly across India as part of a long-running effort to control population growth. Four doctors and officials have been suspended and police have registered a criminal complaint. “It was a serious matter of negligence. It was unfortunate,” said Raman Singh, the chief minister of Chhattisgarh.

More at The Guardian

Indian 10-year-old rape victim behind bars

Lawlessness continues to haunt Uttar Pradesh. Who you are seeing on your screen is not a thief or a juvenile criminal but a rape victim, a 10-year-old rape victim who had been locked up by insensitive Uttar Pradesh police. The victim was put behind bars by women cops after she approached them to file a complaint along with her mother. The victim spent several hours behind the bars after her mother brought her to a women's police station to lodge a complaint against a local goon for allegedly raping her. She was rescued only after locals protested over the matter.

Mother Teresa: Hell's Angel

In 1994, three years before her death, journalist Christopher Hitchens made this documentary asking if Mother Teresa 's reputation was deserved.

World's longest running hunger striker charged with trying to commit suicide

Activist Irom Sharmila, a woman from India’s north-east who has been force-fed for the past 12 years, was flown to Delhi so that a judge could charge her with trying to commit suicide. The 40-year-old declined to play along. “I do not want to commit suicide. Mine is only a non-violent protest,” the activist told the judge, according to the Press Trust of India. “It is my demand to live as a human being. I love life. I do not want to take my life but I want justice and peace.”

The activist known as the Iron Lady of Manipur launched her fast in November 2000 to protest over the killing of a group of civilians by paramilitary forces and to demand the repeal of legislation that provides effective immunity to soldiers. Since then she has refused to eat, drink or even brush her teeth with water.

Refusing to end her fast until the so-called Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) is withdrawn from all of Manipur, she has been repeatedly detained and fed twice a day by a tube attached to her nose. In 2006, she brought her protest to Delhi where she was arrested by police and charged under section 309 of the Indian penal code; the slow nature of the system means her case is only now reaching court.

More on The Independent

Mother Teresa anything but a saint

A study conducted by Canadian researchers has called Mother Teresa "anything but a saint", a creation of an orchestrated and effective media campaign who was generous with her prayers but miserly with her foundation's millions when it came to humanity's suffering.

The controversial study, to be published this month in the journal of studies in religion/sciences called Religieuses, says that Teresa — known across the world as the apostle of the dying and the downtrodden — actually felt it was beautiful to see the poor suffer.

According to the study, the Vatican overlooked the crucial human side of Teresa — her dubious way of caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it.

Instead, the Vatican went ahead with her beatification followed by canonization "to revitalize the Church and inspire the faithful especially at a time when churches are empty and the Roman authority is in decline".

Researchers Serge Larivee and Genevieve Chenard from the University of Montreal's department of psychoeducation, and Carole Senechal of the University of Ottawa's faculty of education, analysed published writings about Mother Teresa and concluded that her hallowed image, "which does not stand up to analysis of the facts, was constructed, and that her beatification was orchestrated by an effective media campaign".

According to Larivee, facts debunk Teresa's myth. He says that the Vatican, before deciding on Teresa's beatification, did not take into account "her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding ... abortion, contraception, and divorce."

At the time of her death, Teresa had 517 missions or "homes for the dying" as described by doctors visiting several of these establishments in Kolkata. They welcomed the poor and sick in more than 100 countries. Two-thirds of the people coming to these missions hoped to a find a doctor to treat them, while the other third lay dying without receiving apt care.

More on The Times of India

The Indian women pushed into hysterectomies

Thousands of Indian women are having their wombs removed in operations that campaigners say are unnecessary and only performed to make money for unscrupulous private doctors.

Sunita is uncertain of her exact age but thinks she's about 25 years old. I met her in a small village in Rajasthan, north-west India, surrounded by chewing cattle and birdsong. She was covered in jewellery, from a nose-stud and rings to bangles which jangled when she gestured with her hand.

Her face hardens when she tells me about her operation. "I went to the clinic because I had heavy bleeding during menstruation," she says. "The doctor did an ultrasound and said I might develop cancer. He rushed me into having a hysterectomy that same day." Sunita says she was reluctant to have the operation straightaway and wanted to discuss it with her husband first. She says the doctor said the operation was urgent and sent her for surgery just hours later.

When other local women crowded round, I asked how many of them had undergone hysterectomies. More than half raised their hands at once. Village leaders said about 90% of the village women have had the operation, including many in their 20s and 30s.

The doctors generally charge around $200 for the operation, which often means the families have to sell cattle and other assets to raise the money.

More on BBC News

‘Two-Finger’ Test for Rape in India

Indian women have made it to the tops of their professions in India. There’s been a female Indian president, women run multi-billion-dollar enterprises and Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress party, is the most powerful politician in the country.

But on the peripheries of big cities and rural areas of the nation, women continue to fight for equal rights – and this is reflected in how authorities treat rape victims, human-rights groups say. Human Rights Watch, in a report released Sunday in India, points to the so-called “two-finger test” as evidence of how India had failed to take rape seriously, often blaming women’s behavior for the offense.

In the test, which appears in Indian jurisprudence textbooks and is admissible in court, a doctor inserts two fingers into a women’s vagina to determine its laxity and whether the hymen is broken, signaling previous sexual activity. The test perpetuates stereotypes of rape survivors as loose women and often is used by defense counsels to achieve acquittals, human-rights groups say.

Comments by politicians that most rape is actually consensual sex, has deepened this way of thinking. There were 24,206 rape cases registered in India in 2011, according to the National Crimes Record Bureau. But the number of convictions of alleged rapists occurred in only a quarter of cases, the statistics show.

India Real Time

Ravi Shankar is Dead

Ravi Shankar 1920 – 2012

Women Banned From Using Mobile Phones In Indian Village Over Fears Of Affairs

A village in Northern Indian has banned women from using mobile phones amid fears they encourage affairs and cause women to elope, local media has reported. If women in the Bihar village of Sunderbari do use mobiles, they face heavy fines, The Hindustan Times reports, listing the penalties as Rs.10,000 (£114) for an unmarried woman or Rs.2,000 (£22) for a married woman. The top end of the fine is a fifth of the average income in the capital of New Delhi, let alone the rural village, where 60% are already living below the poverty line.

The move has been imposed by the village council, under a local government system known as a panchayat. Mohammad Manzoor Alam, who led the council meeting, told Indian news wire IANS: "The mobile phone is the cause of all evils in our society, including increasing love affairs and the incidents of elopement". He told Reuters: "Even married women were deserting their husbands to elope with lovers. That was shameful for us," Alam said. "So, we decided to tackle it firmly. Mobile phones are debasing the social atmosphere."

Huffington Post

Jesus wept … oh, it's bad plumbing

When water started trickling down a statue of Jesus Christ at a Catholic church in Mumbai earlier this year, locals were quick to declare a miracle. Some began collecting the holy water and the Church of Our Lady of Velankanni began to promote it as a site of pilgrimage.

So when Sanal Edamaruku arrived and established that this was not holy water so much as holey plumbing, the backlash was severe. The renowned rationalist was accused of blasphemy, charged with offences that carry a three-year prison sentence and eventually, after receiving death threats, had to seek exile in Finland.

Now he is calling for European governments to press Delhi into dropping the case. And on the first leg of a tour around EU capitals on Friday, he warned that India was sacrificing freedom of expression for outdated, colonial-era rules about blasphemy.

"There is a huge contradiction in the content of the Indian constitution which guarantees freedom of speech and the blasphemy law from 1860 under then colonial rule," Edamaruku told the Guardian in an interview in Dublin.

"This blasphemy law can affect anyone in India – even a girl recently who wrote on Facebook against closing down a city because of the death of a famous local politician. She was prosecuted under the blasphemy law and another girl who 'liked' her comment on Facebook was also arrested and then charged with blasphemy."

More on The Guardian

India's clothing workers: 'They slap us and call us dogs and donkeys'

Workers making clothes that end up in the stores of the biggest names on the British high street have testified to a shocking regime of abuse, threats and poverty pay. Many workers in Indian factories earn so little that an entire month's wages would not buy a single item they produce.

Physical and verbal abuse is rife, while female workers who fail to meet impossible targets say they are berated, called "dogs and donkeys", and told to "go and die". Many workers who toil long hours in an attempt to support their families on poverty wages claim they are cheated out of their dues by their employers.

The allegations, which will be of concern to household names including Gap, H&M, Next and Walmart, were made at a human rights tribunal in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru. The "national people's tribunal for living wages and decent working conditions for garment workers" was convened to investigate widespread human rights abuses in the garment industry.

The Observer

Woman who was refused an abortion has died

Irish health chiefs have launched investigations following the death of a woman in a Galway hospital after she was refused an abortion.
Savita Halappanavar, a dentist aged 31, was 17 weeks pregnant when she died after suffering a miscarriage and septicaemia.

The woman’s husband Praveen Halappanavar, 34, claimed she had complained of being in agonising pain while in University Hospital Galway.
He has said that doctors refused to carry out a medical termination because the foetus’s heartbeat was present.
Mr Halappanavar has claimed that following several requests by his late wife for a termination, they were told: “This is a Catholic country.”
The woman’s death is expected to spark a backlash against the Government for failing to reform health laws to allow abortion if the life of the mother is in danger

Irish Examiner

Mamamia

Why is India so bad for women?

In an ashram perched high on a hill above the noisy city of Guwahati in north-east India is a small exhibit commemorating the life of India's most famous son. Alongside an uncomfortable-looking divan where Mahatma Gandhi once slept is a display reminding visitors of something the man himself said in 1921: "Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity; the female sex (not the weaker sex)."

One evening two weeks ago, just a few miles downhill, a young student left a bar and was set upon by a gang of at least 18 men. They dragged her into the road by her hair, tried to rip off her clothes and smiled at the cameras that filmed it all. It was around 9.30pm on one of Guwahati's busiest streets – a chaotic three-lane thoroughfare soundtracked by constantly beeping horns and chugging tuk-tuks. But for at least 20 minutes, no one called the police. They easily could have. Many of those present had phones: they were using them to film the scene as the men yanked up the girl's vest and tugged at her bra and groped her breasts as she begged for help from passing cars. We know this because a cameraman from the local TV channel was there too, capturing the attack for his viewers' enjoyment. The woman was abused for 45 minutes before the police arrived.

Within half an hour, clips were broadcast on Assam's NewsLive channel. Watching across town, Sheetal Sharma and Bitopi Dutta were horrified. "I was fuming like anything. There was this horrible, brutal assault being shown on screen – and the most disturbing thing was, the blame was being put on the woman, who, the report emphasised, was drunk," says Sharma, a 29-year-old feminist activist from the North-East Network, a women's rights organisation in Guwahati. "The way it was filmed, the camera was panning up and down her body, focusing on her breasts, her thighs," says Dutta, her 22-year-old colleague.

When the police eventually turned up, they took away the woman, who is 20 or 21 (oddly, Guwahati police claimed not to know exactly). While NewsLive re-played pixellated footage of her attack throughout the night, she was questioned and given a medical examination. No attempt was made to arrest the men whose faces could clearly be seen laughing and jeering on camera. Soon afterwards, the editor-in-chief of NewsLive (who has since resigned) remarked on Twitter that "prostitutes form a major chunk of girls who visit bars and night clubs".

Full story on The Guardian – The Hindu - More on reporterindia.com

Binyamin Netanyahu accuses Iran over bombs targeting Israeli diplomats

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has accused Iran of being behind twin attacks on Israeli targets in India and Georgia on Monday in a move likely to further escalate tensions between the two countries and increase international pressure on the Iranian regime.

The attacks, in which four people were injured, followed a warning from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, earlier this month that the Islamic Republic would retaliate against international sanctions and would back "any nation or group" that sought to "confront and fight" Israel.

In Delhi, witnesses said they saw assailants on motorcycles attaching a device to a car when it stopped at a traffic light. In the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, an Israeli embassy driver discovered a device planted on the undercarriage of his car. The modus operandi in both incidents mirrored the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran last month, which Iran claimed was carried out by agents for Israeli intelligence.

The Iranian regime also blamed Israel for a string of earlier assassinations and covert operations. Many in the international community have voiced alarm at the prospect of a low-intensity war between the two states conducted by intelligence operatives and their proxies.

The Guardian

Norwegian authorities take away children from Indian couple because they were eating with their hands

An Indian couple have had their children taken away by Norwegian social workers because they were feeding them with their hands and sleeping in the same bed as them. Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya lost custody of their three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter eight months ago after authorities branded their behaviour inappropriate.

Father Anurup told Indian television channel NDTV: 'They told me ''why are you sleeping with the children in the same bed?'’. '(I told them) this is also a purely cultural issue. We never leave the children in another room and say goodnight to them.' Anurup added: 'Feeding a child with the hand is normal in Indian tradition and when the mother is feeding with a spoon there could be phases when she was overfeeding the child. 'They said it was force feeding. These are basically cultural differences

The drastic measure led to intervention from the Indian government who contacted Norwegian authorities in an a desperate attempt to return the children. The parents have been told that they can only see their children twice a year, for an hour during each visit until the kids turn 18 when they will no longer be bound by the current restrictions under current Norwegian law.

Mail Online