Almost everyone has read about the horrific rape-murder of the 23-year Delhi woman and her male friend. Based on recently released details of the police investigation and media reports, it seems this attack was well-planned by the six accused. Actually, it was more of a planned hunt for victims than a random assault, like a wolf-pack on prowl. The young woman and her male friend were terribly unfortunate to get into the bus of these hunters. The violence and sheer barbarism of that attack shocked all of Delhi and much of India.
Unfortunately, such attacks are not uncommon in today’s India. Last week, there was another gruesome, savage attack on a tea estate in northeastern India, the sort of serene picturesque hillside tea estate you see in tea commercials.
In a well-planned attack, according to an article in the Times of India, 15 workers attacked the residence of the manager of a tea estate, murdered both the manager & his wife, set the residence on fire and tossed the bodies into the burning residence. If this were not chilling enough, a gruesome detail was revealed this week.
According to the Times of India, the attackers chopped up the manager’s body and ate pieces of his flesh before tossing the body into the fire:
- “A few of the attackers vomited after eating the flesh,” said Santosh Kumar Dhan (23), who was arrested on Sunday. “Bhattacharya’s wife died after she was hit hard on the head.”
This gruesome incident has spread fear among other tea executives in other tea estates and their families. According to the Times of India,
- this “fear is debilitating considering the fact that the prime accused along with the majority of the mob that cut Bhattacharya’s body into pieces before burning his bungalow belonged to other tea gardens.” (emphasis ours).
Readers might recall that last year, workers attacked and killed a manager in the sprawling Maruti-Suzuki plant located near Delhi. That attack was also well-planned and according to media reports, the managers who died were apparently hunted down.
We think the planned hunt and murder of the tea estate manager and his wife is just as gruesome and barbaric as the attack on the 23-year old Delhi woman and her male friend. Worker violence against managers has been a long standing problem in India but no one seems to care about it.
The two incidents seem similar to us. Both feature a group of barbaric hunter-attackers facing defenseless victims. The wolf pack mentality and the total absence of police unleashed inhumane savagery in and of the hunters.
India has a horrible law & order problem that is compounded by a pathetic criminal justice system. As we quoted from a reader last week, “Today in Delhi, while there is only one policeman for 364 people, there are 20 policemen per VIP.” India’s police and state machinery sends only one message to the ordinary non-VIP citizens of India – you and your lives just don’t count.
Listen to what the male victim of the Delhi assault said about their treatment by the police and the hospital:
- “We kept pleading to them: ‘Get us an ambulance. Give us clothes to wear.”
- At the state-run hospital, the man said he sat on the floor, shivering, and repeatedly asked in vain for a blanket. Finally, a cleaning boy gave him a piece of cloth.
And this is in Delhi, the capital of the well regarded largest democracy on earth. If Delhi is so bad, how bad is the rest of India?
Delhi might be now the poster city for rape and north east India for worker-manager violence. But violence, horrific savage violence, is a nationwide phenomenon in India. Mumbai is now getting notorious for road rage. Last month, a visiting businessman witnessed a man being severely beaten in a prosperous area of Mumbai. When he tried to intervene, the attackers shoved him into their car, took him to a somewhat isolated area and beat him with iron rods. Fortunately for him, they were not angry enough to kill.
The Financial Media and the Indian Government press machine trumpets India’s demographic dividend, its huge population of young people. The other side of India’s demographic dividend is very stark. Millions of young Indians face rising unemployment, low wages, debilitating inflation and raised aspirations, often to a completely unrealistic level. Add to this volatile mix, a police force, a law & order machinery that doesn’t care, that is almost solely focused on serving the VVIP and then if time permits the ordinary VIPs.
This is why India is beginning to witness savage wolf-pack type assaults by bands of young men, violence the Indian people have not seen for a very long time. This is the stark reality that the New York Times and their colleagues in American-European media don’t bother to cover. It just isn’t a “fashionable” enough issue for them.
Is that why last week’s gruesome murder of the tea estate manager and his wife, widely covered in the Indian press, was totally ignored by the Indian bureaus of New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and their “journalistic” colleagues?
Send your feedback to [email protected] or @MacroViewpoints on Twitter
