Yesterday, a spokesman for Madhya Pradesh police caused anger by suggesting that the Swiss woman and her husband were partly to blame for the attack. Inspector Avnesh Kumar Budholiya said the tourists had been careless in travelling to a remote part of the country they knew little about.
“No one stops there,” he said. “Why did they choose that place? They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They would have passed a police station on the way to the area they camped. They should have stopped and asked about places to sleep.”
The attack comes three months after the fatal gang rape of a woman on a New Delhi bus which sparked outrage over the treatment of women in Indian society.
[WS:] This kinds of news come as a surprise. I did not think of the Indian society as being particularly violent, but this suggests there is a dark side there too. I wonder if this represents a new development or merely increased media attention to an existing problem.
One possibility is that if this is an upsurge of violent crime, this may be a result of the spread of neoliberalism. When I lived in China in the late 1960s, crime was not an issue there. I would walk with my mother almost everywhere without the fear of being attacked or robbed.
I recall the following incident: one time we went to a nearby store where my mom bought some stuff. Shortly after we returned, the doorman called and said that someone wants to speak to my mom. It was a clerk from the store - after we left he discovered that he made a mistake and did not give my mom enough change, so he decided to return it. The amount was rather small, but since the locals did not earn much, it was worth considerably more to them than to my mom - but yet they took the effort to return the money instead of simply pocketing it. After China turned capitalist I hear that crime and corruption are rampant there, so it must be a product of capitalism.
I wonder if a similar process is taking place in India. Anyone?
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."